Scott Spiegel

President Barack Obama demonstrated his pro-gay credentials last week by having Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett renounce comments she had made that 15-year-old gay suicide victim Justin Aaberg had been bullied because of a “lifestyle choice” he had made.

Obama backed up Jarrett by announcing at an MTV townhall meeting that being gay is “not a choice,” thus discovering something Ronald Reagan figured out 32 years ago.

The remarks topped off a busy week of fierce advocacy from our Fierce Advocate for gay rights, coming as it did after Obama’s Justice Department filed a fierce brief appealing U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro’s overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and an advocatory brief appealing U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips’ injunction against Pentagon enforcement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT).

The administration evidently hates DADT so much that it disobeyed Philips’ injunction and upheld the law by allowing a Texas recruiting station to refuse reenlistment to decorated veteran Omar Lopez, who had been ousted after five years of service in the Navy for “homosexual admission.”

Obama has been insisting that DADT “will end on my watch.”  Given his actions over the past year-and-a-half, perhaps what he really means is that when someone—anyone—other than him takes steps to repeal it, he’ll be “sure to watch.”

Meanwhile, evidence for the administration’s ludicrous claim that immediate lifting of the ban will have “enormous consequences” for the military has yet to materialize.

In the midst of all this fierce advocacy, the national gay Republican group Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) won an actual victory last Tuesday, in the form of Phillips’ injunction against DADT, the next step in the resolution of the case LCR had successfully filed opposing the policy.

LCR and fellow gay conservative group GOProud also called out New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino for his lunkheaded complaints to a group of conservative orthodox rabbis in the Bronx that homosexuality was not a “successful or valid” option and that schools shouldn’t “brainwash” students into accepting it.

The effect of denouncements by these and other Republican groups was that Paladino almost entirely walked back his comments within 24 hours of being criticized, concluding with this statement on Tuesday—“I am 100 percent unequivocally pro gay rights, except for one thing: gay marriage”—which, if true, technically puts him on the same place on the political spectrum on gay issues as Obama.  (A report late last week that Paladino had once been the landlord for two popular Buffalo gay clubs, Cobalt and Buddies II, arguably makes him even more fabulous than Obama.)

Paladino remarked, “I’ve been a high supporter of the gay community my entire career and I will continue to be.  The Log Cabin people know that.  The gay community in Buffalo knows that.  They know my nature and they know the way I’ve been.  The real message is getting out.”

As regressive as Paladino is in his personal beliefs, he is indisputably more susceptible to moderation on gay issues than his rival Andrew Cuomo is on taxes, government regulation, and state interference in economic matters.  Did I miss Cuomo’s public statement asserting, “I’ve been a high supporter of the Constitution and limited government my entire career and I will continue to be.  The Tea Party people know that.  The conservatives in Albany know that.  They know my nature and they know the way I’ve been.  The real message is getting out.”

Paladino’s reversal cost him the endorsement of Rabbi Yehuda Levin, leader of the Orthodox Jewish community to whom Paladino originally made his statements on homosexuality, thus negating the effect of his making the comments in the first place.

Anyway, what role will Paladino actually have in gay issues in his (self-declared) one term as governor, except for vetoing gay marriage should it pass (he has stated he will uphold it if decided in a referendum)?  In contrast, is Cuomo as susceptible to withdrawing his support for crippling taxes on high earners, ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, etc., in the 12 terms he’ll serve if voted into office?

Paladino’s lieutenant governor candidate Greg Edwards similarly demonstrated his loathing of gays by attending a Log Cabin political action committee fundraiser at the Soldiers’ Sailors’ Marines’ Coast Guard & Airmen’s Club in Manhattan last Tuesday, the day Paladino apologized for his comments.  The event’s speakers included New York Republican State Committee Chairman Ed Cox and two pro-gay marriage Republican New York State Assembly members, as well as Republican minority leader B. Dean Skelos, who promised to bring gay marriage back up for a vote if the GOP becomes the majority party next year and urged all Republicans to feel free to “vote their conscience.”

In other recent Republicans-are-doing-more-for-gays-than-Obama news, Republican-appointed Republican judge Vaughn Walker overturned the anti-gay marriage referendum Prop 8 in California two months ago.  The lawsuit was filed by the two lawyers who argued Bush v. Gore in 2000, and the effort was spearheaded by one of them (hint: it was the Republican).

The growing list of prominent Republicans who support same-sex marriage now includes: Dick Cheney, Ted Olson, Laura Bush, Glenn Beck, Cindy McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The list of Democrats who oppose gay marriage still includes: Barack Obama.

For 20 months, the Obama administration has been steadily doing everything it can to bolster the case that Democratic politicians are no better on gay issues than Republican politicians.  Last week was merely a banner week for Obama’s demonstration of this fact.



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• Is Obama’s Excuse for Not Repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Legitimate? (newsweek.com)
• Gay marriage surfaces as an issue in state races (yahoo.com)
• Military recruiters told to accept gay applicants (yahoo.com)
• WH’s Jarrett: Dead Gay Bully Victim Made ‘Lifestyle Choice’ (mpetrelis.blogspot.com)
• Discharged Gay vet refused re-enlistment despite lack of DADT law (gay.americablog.com)

Discouraging military service, bean counting minority group members instead of evaluating achievement, injecting irrelevant sexual undertones—sound like conservative stances to me!

As Miss Manners once wrote on sexual orientation, the important distinction these days seems to be not gays vs. straights, but people who think other people’s sex lives are open for scrutiny vs. those who don’t.

A rapidly dwindling number of conservatives have been arguing that the military should preserve its ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The U.S.’s highest ranking military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, happens to disagree.  In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, he declared in no uncertain terms that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nation’s other top defense official, testified alongside Mullen in support of repealing the ban.

Just before President Obama took office, 104 retired admirals and generals had signed a statement urging the next president to overturn the ban.

Apparently all of this wasn’t good enough for Senator John McCain, who had categorically stated in 2006, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”  Last week McCain told Mullen and Gates that he still opposes lifting the ban.

I can understand some conservatives’ suspicion regarding overturning the ban on gays in the military, when the last president who tried to do so (Clinton) had nothing but contempt for the military and aggressively eroded its capabilities every year he was in office.

But those opposed to lifting the ban have offered a lame series of unrelated, “they doth protest too much”-sounding excuses more befitting liberals’ shifting defenses of their misguided and unconstitutional policies.

For example, there’s the argument that we shouldn’t “experiment” with the military while we’re in the middle of two wars.

I notice that we weren’t in the middle of any wars in 1993, when President Clinton first proposed lifting the ban.  If anything, we need more recruits now, due to the notoriously long and repeated tours of duty our soldiers have had to undergo in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for specialized recruits such as Arabic translators.

The notion that our current roster of troops could do their jobs better if they weren’t distracted by the presence of the estimated 65,000 gay U.S. troops helping them out is ludicrous.  The more soldiers who are trained and willing to fight our wars, the better.  One of the best conservative arguments for the greatness of the U.S. is that we are able to get so many highly qualified people to volunteer for our military, and that so few leave due to conflict or dissatisfaction.

The necessity of maximizing troop strength during wartime is also reflected by the fact that the number of troops discharged for being gay decreased almost every year from 2001 to 2009, even though general military enlistment was up after the September 11 attacks.

For what it’s worth, we did experiment with this policy in recent history, and during a war at that: the ban on discharging gays was suspended during the Persian Gulf War, with no adverse consequences.

Then there’s the highly objective and verifiable suggestion that homosexuality is “incompatible” with military service.

This flimsy proposition is torn to smithereens by the inconvenient facts that gays: (1) currently serve honorably in the military, (2) have served honorably in the military since our country’s founding, and (3) already serve openly in the military in 30 major countries around the world, including nearly every NATO member and other U.S. allies such as Australia and Israel.  American soldiers serve alongside openly gay soldiers in these armies, and I haven’t heard about any mass defections on their part over fellow gay soldiers’ unprofessional conduct.

Conservatives generally reject affirmative action, correctly viewing the policy as amounting to reverse discrimination.  Why are so many conservatives hell-bent on discriminating against gays in the military?  It is true that some conservatives probably fear the day when gay rights groups start pushing for loosened standards for gays in the military to promote diversity or to right historical wrongs.  But just because the same thing happened with race and gender doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have granted equal rights to African Americans and women.

Violent felons, card-carrying Marxists, and radical Islamists may all happily serve in the U.S. army.  What sense does it make that, say, an Episcopalian Log Cabin Republican can’t?  Even a gay person who never utters a word about his sexual orientation in the military can be discharged for the act of getting married in one of the five states that allow it.

There’s also the contention that unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Yet the same claim was made regarding racial integration of the military in the 1950s.  This assertion slanders dedicated service members by purporting that (1) gay soldiers can’t do their jobs without making sexual advances toward their peers, and (2) heterosexual soldiers can’t do their jobs without dwelling on the possibility of advances from their peers.  Here I thought conservatives were the ones who held our military in such high esteem.

Admittedly, gays are asking for a tall order from the military: namely—nothing.  Nothing needs to be done to allow gays to serve openly, except for our Commander-in-Chief or Congress to declare that it be so.  Gays already serve.  Heterosexual service members claim they already know who many of their gay unit members are and don’t care.  If heterosexual soldiers can discern the most obvious cases and aren’t uncomfortable around these people, I think they can tolerate the existence of cases so undetectable they otherwise wouldn’t have guessed if they hadn’t found out.

All the military needs to do now is stop wasting time and resources sniffing out gays like contraband and axing them after having spent millions of dollars to train them.

Leftists are usually the ones infusing sexual undercurrents and lurid motives where none exist—pointing out latent homoeroticism in “Winnie the Pooh” or condemning “heteronormativity” in Jane Austen.  Why are some conservatives so intent on insisting that the seething, passionate impetus undergirding military service is… gay lust?

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