Democracy Has Prevailed.

May 27, 2010

Teh Crazie - DADT Edition

The spark that set off teh crazies was reported (among many other places, of course) by the NY Times:
President Obama, the Pentagon and leading lawmakers reached agreement Monday on legislative language and a time frame for repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, clearing the way for Congress to take up the measure as soon as this week.
This of course has whip teh crazies into berserker mode.

But let's first see if there's any popular support for repealing DADT. Surprise, surprise, surprise, there is:
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday indicates that 78 percent of the public supports allowing openly gay people to serve in the military, with one in five opposed.
Here's the poll data if you wanna check the numbers.

Teh Crazies' response?

Gays are vicious because Hitler was gay and he used gays as his most vicious "enforcers. And gays will use the new rules to rape as many defenseless straights in the military as they can.

Point one - the vicious, from the American Family Association. According to talkingpointsmemo, Bryan Fisher (of the AFA) set us all straight on those nasty gays:
So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.
Hitler was gay? Wait wait, I figured out the logic. Hitler was also a vegetarian and since we all know that some vegetarians are gay, ergo and ipso facto Hitler was gay! And because Hitler was a vicious monster, gays must also be vicious monsters!

I guess curing the vegetarian of his/her meat-phobia is the only solution. Only the cheeseburger can save our helpless straight brothers and sisters from teh gays in the military!

Point two - the raping, from the equally odious Family Research Council. Again, from tpm:
Here's how the Family Research Council envisions things going if Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed: first, more straight soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines will be fellated in their sleep against their will. Then, commanders afraid of being labeled homophobes will refuse to do anything about it. Eventually, the straight service members will quit out of fear.

On a conference call with reporters today, FRC Senior Fellow for Policy Studies Peter Sprigg delivered the results of what he said was the first-ever study of "homosexual assault" in the military. Joined by several former military officers opposed to allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, he warned Congress that the DADT repeal language currently under discussion with the agreement of the White House will turn the U.S. military into a terrifying free-rape zone where no heterosexual is safe.
Here's the study. And from the first page we see:
Members of the military are regularly placed in positions of forced intimacy with their fellow servicemembers—showering and sleeping in close proximity and spending time with one another twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The military continues to provide separate bathroom, shower, and sleeping facilities for men and women in order to protect their privacy during these intimate activities. However, allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military would likely result, for the first time, in heterosexuals being forced to cohabit with those who may view them as a potential sexual object.
So just how much projection is there going on here anyway?

The breathless warning about intimate sleeping and showering quarters where the predatory gays wait to pounce on their helpless victims...

4 comments:

Brant said...

What the opponents of DADT repeal conveniently leave out is the fact that gay people, probably dating to the American Revolution, have always been serving and sleeping and eating alongside their hetero comrades in the U.S. military. And yet, somehow, the military has suffered no ill effects. As someone who served in the Army, with gay people, I can tell you that among most service members, this is really a non-issue.

EdHeath said...

You really have to wonder, with all the guns and knives and grenades and what not in the military, I would think that non-consensual homosexual rape in the military would be fairly problematic.

Jason Cable said...

Didn't I just hear on CNN last week that the only branch of the military that does not have separate sleeping quarters (at least state-side) is the Navy? This makes my head hurt. My opinion is that gay service members are held to the same professional conduct standards that straight ones are. If they go around raping the innocents, they should be busted. Every former and active military person I have spoken with has known gays and lesbians and none have cared about it. Repeal DADT, reinstate those willing to fight and die for our country. It is *their* right to serve.

Anonymous said...

Since "Teh Crazies" like to equate Obama with Hitler, does that also mean that they think he is gay? Is his marriage to Michelle Obama a sham?

By the way, all House Democrats in PA voted for it except for Critz. All Republicans voted against it.