Posts on Elaine Donnelly

Over the weekend, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story about a man who had worked for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for 17-years and then lost his job when it was discovered that he had failed to register with the Selective Service.  He has now joined three other ex-federal employees in filing a lawsuit arguing that the Selective Service System violates the Constitution by discriminating against men.

You just know that in any article about women in the military, Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness is going to be quoted saying something predictably reasoned and insightful, and she does not disappoint: 

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush opened a discussion on the gender issue, convening the "Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces." The commission was overwhelmingly against both forced military service for females or placing them in combat units.

"You don't draft anyone unless you need combat replacements," said Elaine Donnelly, a member of the commission and president of the Center for Military Readiness, a non-partisan group. "Female soldiers in direct ground combat situations would not have an equal opportunity to survive."

She criticizes feminist groups for making "unreasonable" demands on the military.

It is exactly that sort of expertise and commitment to equality that landed Donnelly on the cover of the last issue of Focus on the Family’s “Citizen” magazine and won her accolades from Robert Knight and Tom Minnery:

[I]t’s hard to run over Elaine Donnelly. She has credentials, and she knows her subject. In 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger appointed her to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services; in 1992 Presi-dent George H.W. Bush appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. Her articles have been widely published, and she has appeared on many national news programs.

But hers is a small organization, and she needs reinforcements. She needs to know that she is not the only civilian willing to defend the Defense Department. Let me ask you to do three things:

1) Find excerpts of her testimony on the Internet and watch the nastiness leveled at her. It will make you mad, and that will get you energized for points two and three.

2) Find your way to her Web site, CMRlink.org, and read her testimony—all of it, including her highly-detailed footnotes, and you will get an expert’s analysis of the problem of homosexuality in the military as well as the growing reality of women in infantry combat units.

3) Make a generous donation to her Center for Military Readiness—it’s tax-deductible—and then keep on making them, and from time to time enclose a personal note about your pride in participating in this particular battle. It is one we must win.

Elaine Donnelly is indeed a hero to a lot of us at Focus on the Family, including Dr. Dobson. We’ve supported her work every way we know how, for a long time. Now it’s your turn to step up.

Apparently, tomorrow the Eagle Forum and RADAR [Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting] are co-hosting an all-day event entitled “The Conflict between Federal Domestic Violence Policies and Traditional Family Values” [PDF] at The Heritage Foundation that will focus on how to do away with the Violence Against Women Act: . 

The Violence Against Women Act, which now costs the federal government $1 billion a year, has spawned an industry that undermines Constitutional protections, thwarts welfare reform, weakens military readiness, fosters immigration fraud, and is harmful to families. This conference will probe how to rein in a federal law that increasingly encroaches on the personal lives of millions of Americans.

Just check out the forum’s agenda:

9:30
Feminist Fatherphobia and Domestic Violence
Phyllis Schlafly – Eagle Forum

10:00
How Marriage Protects Against Domestic Violence
Robert Rector – Heritage

10:45
How Domestic Violence Policies Weaken Families and Harm Children
Stephen Baskerville, PhD – Patrick Henry College
Foundation

11:15
VAWA: Victimizing All Taxpayers Act?
Benjamin Foster, PhD, CPA – University of Louisville College of Business

11:45
Impact on Military Readiness
Elaine Donnelly – Center for Military Readiness

It’s easy to understand that “marriage protects against domestic violence” provided that you share Schlafly’s view that wives cannot be raped by their husbands.

Elaine Donnelly blames everyone but herself for her embarrassing performance: "'The follow-up media describing this hearing just continued a very abusive atmosphere. It was not by any means the kind of fair hearing that we had been led to expect,' she contends. 'But that was for two reasons -- the Democrats were determined to shape the hearing into the image that they had in mind. And secondly, the Republicans did not show up.'
According to a statement released by Donnelly Monday afternoon, she and Brian Jones -- a retired sergeant of the Army's Delta Force -- had difficulty being heard 'because liberal members of the committee attacked our motives, asked absurd questions, and tried to bully us in the presence of hostile media.'"

This is what happens when people like Elaine Donnelly are allowed to testify before Congress: "Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of 'transgenders in the military.' She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading 'HIV positivity' through the ranks."

Why exactly is Elaine Donnelly, president of Center for Military Readiness, being allowed to testify before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel on the issue of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"?

Elaine Donnelly seemingly has no actual experience serving in the military, but that hasn’t stopped her from establishing a career as president of the Center for Military Readiness through which she crusades against women and gays in the military.  

The Detroit News profiled Donnelly back in November 2006 and explained that she initially got her start in politics working alongside Phyllis Schlafly in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment:

Donnelly has been expressing such opinions for more than two decades in an activist career that began alongside conservative anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment.

She was briefly involved in Michigan Republican politics during the 1980s, serving as first female chair of the state GOP's issue committee, and played an active role opposing the elder President Bush.

During years of debate on the ERA, Donnelly said, she became frightened by the possibility her two daughters could be forced to register for selective service, just as boys are when they turn 18. In 1984, the Reagan administration appointed her to a Pentagon committee on women in the armed forces, and eight years later, the first President Bush placed her on a presidential commission examining policies on assigning women.

Those experiences cemented, she said, the conviction that liberals are intent on imposing their social agenda on the military, even if the evidence says those policies hurt the military's ability to fight.

Since then, Donnelly has made it her mission to ensure that women do not serve in combat and that gays do not serve at all while making outrageous statements, such as her suggestion that retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili recent call for the repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was somehow tied to a stoke he had suffered.

So when Donnelly sent out a survey to all presidential candidates demanding to know whether they will “promote inclusion and acceptance of homosexuals in the military” and “faithfully enforce the 1993 statute … which states that homosexuals are not eligible to serve in the military,” the candidates had enough sense to ignore her – except for one:

[Mike] Huckabee, was the only candidate who provided complete answers to the [Center for Military Readiness’] questions, Mrs. Donnelly said. Mr. Huckabee stated that he supports compliance with regulations and laws banning women in or near direct ground combat and he also opposes Selective Service registration of young women.

While Fred Thompson was the only other candidate to respond, he did so only with a statement saying he “supports current law regarding gays in the military and current Defense Department policies”  whereas the Huckabee campaign actually took the time to respond in full to her questions, thus reinforcing the growing sense that his willingness to engage and associate himself with fringe right-wing activists seems to know no bounds. 

When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that he would not reappoint Gen. Peter Pace to serve a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the reasoning behind the decision was relatively clear:

General Pace’s reputation has nevertheless become intertwined with the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the heavy tolls that the subsequent counter-insurgency fights have inflicted on the United States military. He has been criticized by some senior officers who saw him as too deferential to civilian leadership, in particular former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and too inattentive to the impact of prolonged war-fighting on the Army, Marines and their National Guard and Reserve elements.

…

The defense secretary, though, said his conversations with senior lawmakers of both parties had led him to conclude that “the focus of his confirmation process would have been on the past, rather than the future” and “that there was the very real prospect the process would be quite contentious.”

A confirmation debate over the Bush administration’s handling of war in Iraq and the role Pace played in the debacle would undoubtedly have been “contentious” and so the administration decided that it would be easier to just replace Pace than to go through with such hearings.  

Case closed?  Not if your job requires that you have an almost single-minded dedication to uncovering evidence of nefarious homosexual plottings and maneuverings regarding the military:    

"General Pace made statements that were opposed by the homosexual activist community, and that issue is why the administration chose not to fight for his reconfirmation," says [Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness]. "The administration chose to switch rather than fight -- and in this case, I think that is mistaken."

Three months ago, Pace stated that he supported the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy because “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral.”   According to Donnelly, it was because of this that the Bush administration is now attempting to appease gay activists by sacrificing Pace in the middle of the war he has overseen for the last two years.  

That makes sense, because if there is one thing the Bush administration is constantly trying to avoid, it’s angering gay activists by nominating people who exhibit an open hostility to homosexuals:  

President Bush's nominee for surgeon general, Kentucky cardiologist Dr. James Holsinger, has come under fire from gay-rights groups for, among other things, voting to expel a lesbian pastor from the United Methodist Church and writing in 1991 that gay sex is unnatural and unhealthy.

Also, Holsinger helped found a Methodist congregation that, according to gay-rights activists, believes homosexuality is a matter of choice and can be "cured."

…

As president of the Methodist Church's national Judicial Council, Holsinger voted last year to support a pastor who blocked a gay man from joining a congregation. In 2004, he voted to expel a lesbian from the clergy. The majority of the panel voted to keep the lesbian associate pastor in place, citing questions about whether she had openly declared her homosexuality, but Holsinger dissented.

Sixteen years ago, he wrote a paper for the church in which he likened the reproductive organs to male and female "pipe fittings" and argued that homosexuality is therefore biologically unnatural.

"When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur," Holsinger wrote, citing studies showing higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases among gay men and the risk of injury from anal sex.