Everybody loves a parade, don’t they? Especially gays. And gay-loving militaries the world over. I mean, with homos in the ranks, they aren’t much for fighting, but they can build a fabulous flotilla of floats.
Or so Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council thinks. On Sept. 17, Perkins hosted a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” panel at the Values Voters Summit, which is basically a circuit party for social conservatives — except there’s no dancing, since gyrations of any kind are the devil’s movements.
Perkins claims “our military is under immense attack from within our country” because Obama has made it a priority to “force the military to embrace homosexuality” regardless of “what the military thought.”
And to explain what the military thinks, Perkins was flanked by retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, a senior fellow for defense policy at FRC, and Sgt. Brian Fleming, a young man injured twice in Afghanistan.
Fleming claims that gay soldiers can’t be trusted because you wouldn’t know if they had “inappropriate” motives for wanting to be your friend. Never mind that the ban is a recipe for mistrust since it’s a policy based on dishonesty.
Maginnis calls the U.S. military a “moral-based organization” (because it’s moral for a dude to kill another dude, so long as he doesn’t kiss another dude).
And since no moral person would want to be around a bunch of queers, Perkins claims that if we let gays into the military, “we will see Bible-believing chaplains being forced out of the military and not joining the military, leaving a huge vacuum.”
Letting gays serve openly would be to “just stab [servicemembers] in the heart” and would be “suicide for an all-volunteer force,” according to Maginnis.
“That’s why countries … that have the 10 largest militaries in the world say, ‘No, this isn’t the thing to do,’” Maginnis says.
Perkins chimes in: “Well, those that do [let gays serve], they’re the ones that participate in parades, they don’t fight wars to keep the nation [and] the world free.”
The crowd bursts into applause and Maginnis responds, “Right.”
Except, you know, not right. In fact, not only are the countries that allow gays and lesbians to serve openly more than glorified color guards, several of them are actually U.S. allies.
Take Israel, for example, where gay and lesbian troops have been serving openly since 1993. And then there are countries that have sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Now, I’m not a military expert, but I have a feeling these allied troops are doing more than dressing up as clowns and riding unicycles while throwing candy to smiling Iraqi and Afghan children lining the streets (although I do admit I think soldiers dressed as mimes would be an excellent psychological warfare tactic. This responsibility would obviously fall to the French).
Oh, by the way, those countries “that have the 10 largest militaries in the world” and who also reject homos include China, Russia, North Korea and Egypt. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters says, “That’s generally not a list you want your country to be on where human rights issues are concerned.”
But that would be a real bummer. So Perkins makes a hilarious joke about tranny soldiers trying to figure out which uniform to wear. And everybody laughs.
D’Anne Witkowski is a Detroit-based freelance writer.