DADT Repeal Accelerates And Counter-Arguments Grow Increasingly Unhinged (VIDEO)
Over the years, proponents of the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy have advanced all sorts of specious arguments about how allowing gays to enlist in the military would bring about certain doom for America. Gay soldiers would undermine unit cohesion, they'd reduce morale, they'd inspire their fellow soldiers to not save them from certain doom in foxholes, they'd make "Fleet Week" too stylish, and so on and so forth.
Of course, all of this ignored the simple facts that right now gays are known to be in the military and none of these things are happening at all. Instead, what's happening is: if a soldier's identity as a member of the gay community crosses some arbitrary threshold of awareness, suddenly that soldier can no longer sit in a room and translate Farsi. This is basically what military policy looks like when its governed by people with the maturity of tweens.
But now that a repeal of DADT seems to be accelerating, you can expect to hear some truly frantic, bonkers arguments. For example, we have the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer, who took to the radio to basically argue that there were gay Nazis, and LOOK HOW THAT TURNED OUT!
FISCHER: 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.
Oh, but I'm sure that if it had been left up to all the heterosexual Nazis, the Third Reich would have been one long cuddle party!
Over at TPM, Zachary Roth provides the much-needed historical clarification:
There is very little hard evidence that Hitler himself was gay -- though a bevy of historians has examined the question. The iota of truth behind Fischer's view is that several leaders of the SA -- the tightly organized band of street brawlers hat helped Hitler rise to power -- were gay. That included Ernst Rohm, the unit's founder and leader. But after Hitler began to doubt the SA's loyalty, Rohm was arrested on the "Night of Long Knives" in 1934, and executed soon after. The SA subsequently took a backseat in the movement to Heinrich Himmler's SS, whose allegiance to the Fuhrer was unquestioned.
Elsewhere, Family Research Council Tony Perkins is convinced that letting gays and lesbians serve in the military (again, they are ALREADY SERVING) will lead to an increase in incidents of sexual assault in the military. As Alex Pareene points out: "Now, you may assume that the vast majority of cases of sexual assault in the armed forces is perpetrated by straight men against women. And your assumption would be completely, 100% correct."
RELATED:
Top Social Conservative: Hitler Used Gay Soldiers Because They Had 'No Limits' [TPM]
"Homosexuals" in the military will assault everyone, Christian right warns [Salon War Room]
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First Posted: 05/26/10 06:23 PM ET Updated: 05/25/11 05:35 PM ET