Elaine Donnelly

Mitt Romney has attempted to thread the needle on whether gays and lesbians have a right to serve openly in the military, saying he staunchly opposed the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell but is not willing to reinstate the policy. In a 1994 letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, Romney called Don’t Ask Don’t Tell “the first of a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation's military,” but then in 2007 Romney claimed he originally found the policy “silly” but effective, and has since criticized attempts to repeal it. In a June debate Romney dodged a question on whether he would reverse the repeal, until he finally told the Des Moines Register editorial board this week that he would oppose the restoration of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

While his halfhearted and milquetoast stand may not surprise the vast majority of Americans who supported the policy’s repeal, it has not played well with Religious Right activists who want to see Don’t Ask Don’t Tell reinstated.

Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness recently started the Military Culture Coalition along with other conservative leaders to oppose repeal efforts, denounced Romney for his position of supporting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in principle but not its reinstatement:

Donnelly questioned Governor Romney's comments to the Des Moines Register, noting that "The military does not work that way. Flawed policies that impose heavy 'complicating features' on the backs of military men and women cannot and should not be switched on and off, depending on the direction of political winds or promises made to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) activists of either political party."

She added, "Sound policies that reinforce morale and readiness should be maintained at all times. A long list of what Governor Romney calls 'complicating features' were caused when the 2010 lame-duck Congress voted for Obama's LGBT Law and related policies. Current problems and those yet to come are no more acceptable now than in the midst of a shooting war."

Sandy Rios of Family-Pac and the former head of Concerned Women for America mocked Romney for the “audacity” to say he is more conservative than other candidates while revealing a complete lack of conviction regarding his views on open service in the military:

As the issue of allowing gays to openly serve in the military raged last year, Mitt Romney let it be known he roundly opposed the idea. He was outraged ... incensed. Many conservatives were certain this was the real Mitt revealing himself after years of having to pretend to embrace gay rights as governor of Massachusetts. With this messy business of his position on gay rights out of the way, they could at last breathe a sigh of relief and support the man they thought looked and sounded presidential and had the credentials to turn the economy around.

But now that has all changed. In an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board last Friday, the former Massachusetts governor explained that it wasn't the concept of having gays openly serve in the military that had troubled him ... only the fact that the change was being made in a time of war. Now that the conflict is over, he would not, as Commander in Chief, do anything to change it.

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As if to drive his point further, Romney added that Gingrich's "unreliability" hadn't just been 14-15 years ago, but in the last 2-3 years. Yet Mitt Romney's latest leap from conservatism had only taken place a few days prior. What kind of audacity does it take to stand before a news agency editorial board and brag in the face of the evidence that you are the most conservative candidate?

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One could go further back with Romney's liberal/conservative iterations, but these are current examples which, in the case of gays in the military, goes back not a few years but a few days. Surely it is a quantum leap to assign him the mantle of conservatism in the current race.

Truth and honesty are inconvenient at times, but they are as much a part of conservative values as any position on the economy or national defense. Dishonesty and deceit are basic disqualifiers -- and bend as we may to excuse the inexcusable, in Romney's case, they are very hard to ignore.

Not to be outdone, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association went after Romney and Ron Paul, who voted in favor of repeal last year, calling them “non-starters as candidates”:

If evangelical Christians simply vote their values, there is simply no way they can cast a vote for someone who is in favor of legitimizing homosexual behavior in the military.

In the GOP field, there are just two candidates who support the presence of sexual deviancy in our armed forces: Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Romney told the editorial board of the Des Moines Register last Friday that he is just fine with sexually aberrant behavior in the military.

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Bottom line: for values-driven voters who claim to be conservative and to draw their values from the Judeo-Christian tradition, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are both likely to be - and should be - non-starters as candidates. If a voter only claims to be a social conservative but isn’t one in fact, then a vote for Romney or Paul is not likely to be a problem.

During his show for American Family Radio, the president of the American Family Association Tim Wildmon claimed that President Obama “doesn’t give a rip” about the military because he supported the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. “Folks, remember elections have consequences, President Obama wanted to force open homosexuality in the military, and that’s what he’s done, with the help of Congress,” Wildmon said, “So we elected a Commander-in-Chief who doesn’t give a rip about the Marines or the Army, he just wants to force homosexuality into every place that he can.” Along with Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, and guest Elaine Donnelly, the three discussed the last-ditch strategies to preserve the discriminatory policy by the GOP-controlled House.

After expressing hope that efforts to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would ultimately fail, Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness (who, by the way, is not close to being an expert on the issue) told Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid that the draft is on its way once DADT is scrapped. According to Donnelly, the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell “could put remaining troops in greater danger, and break the All-Volunteer Force.”

Donnelly joins other right wing activists like Tony Perkins, David Bossie, Frank Gaffney, and Bryan Fischer, in forecasting the return of conscription as a result of the repeal. In 2006, Donnelly also predicted that allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly will lead to “forcible sodomy,” “introducing erotic factors,” and the proliferation of “HIV positivity.”

Kincaid, though, held out hope that the incoming House Republican majority and Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), the designated Chair of the Armed Services Committee, would be able to block repeal:

McKeon had told reporters that he wanted to hold hearings that would include rank-and-file service members along with military leaders. “I would really like to hear from battlefield commanders,” McKeon said. “I would like to hear from battalion commanders, I would like to hear from company commanders on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq to see what their feelings are.”

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So will Congress approve the changes, knowing that they could result in the return of the military draft?

As the Times indicates, the specific language of the bill is that the repeal must be “consistent with the standards of military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces.”

The burden is on the gay rights lobby to prove that the changes would have no negative effect on any of the above. How can they prove such a thing when the Pentagon has already concluded that the change is risky and faces opposition from as many as 60 percent of our combat troops?

But the Pentagon’s own “Comprehensive Review of the Issues Associated with the Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” found, “In the key areas of military readiness, unit effectiveness, and unit cohesion the risks were all deemed to be LOW” and that “the change in culture and environment in warfighting units will be minimal.” 69% of respondents already claimed to have knowingly served with a gay or lesbian soldier, and of them “92% stated that the unit’s ‘ability to work together’ was ‘very good,’ ‘good,’ or ‘neither good nor poor.’”

But Donnelly and Kincaid continue to discount and distort the clear evidence from the Pentagon's study that the repeal of DADT will have little effect at all on the military, and claim that unless Republicans belatedly block the repeal, a draft is imminent.

Every so often, an obscure but well-heeled group called the American Society for Tradition, Family and Property pops up on the scene to make its case for ... well, tradition, family, or property.

Today it is out with a press release announcing a press conference tomorrow where it will release its lengthy defense of keeping gays out of the military

Reacting to the current push to force the U.S. military to accept open homosexuals in the Armed Forces, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) published a well-documented study today, providing hard-hitting reasons to reject the proposal.

The group's statement is titled "To Keep Our Honor Clean: Why We Must Oppose the Homosexual Agenda for the Military."

News Conference: Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, and leaders of several major organizations will participate in a Thursday press conference to announce their support for the 1993 law regarding homosexuals in the military. The news conference will be held at the Marriott Wardman-Park Hotel (room 8216) in Washington, D.C. at 2:00 PM.

The document itself has already been posted on the TFP website and it is something to behold:

[D]uring wartime, men are in continual contact with each other’s blood. Therefore, the well documented increased disease rates of homosexuals would cause them to be perceived as a risk rather than an asset to unit survival.

This increased disease rate should not be underestimated. As Colonel Ronald Ray pointed out: “Despite the fact that they account for less than 2 percent of the total American population, a compilation of recent health studies shows that homosexuals account for 80 percent of America’s most serious sexually transmitted diseases.”

This increased disease rate has led some to refer to the homosexual lifestyle as a “deathstyle.” Inclusion of this deathstyle in our Armed Forces is a dangerous proposition, indeed.

TFP's citation for that 80% figure is "Colonel Ronald D. Ray, USMCR, Gays: In or out? (Washington: Brassey’s (US), 1993) p. 46."  I can't find the report itself ... but it doesn't matter because it is obviously nonsense.  To get a picture of the sorts of insanely anti-gay things Ray has written, just check out this essay he wrote entitled “Lifting The Ban On Homosexuals In The Military: The Subversion Of A Moral Principle,” especially the conclusion in which he warns to any effort to allows gays to serve in the military will cause God to destory America just like he did to Sodom and Gomorrah.

But the real reason that TFP opposes the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is because it would destroy the honor of our military: 

It is these values of uprightness, self-sacrifice and strength that project the military into a superior order of things. In a word, they confer an honor upon it, which is so identified with the archetype of the American soldier that our nation’s highest military decoration is called the Medal of Honor.

However, homosexual vice represents the opposite of this military honor. It violates natural law, epitomizes the unleashing of man’s unruly passions, undermines self-discipline and has been defined as “intrinsically evil” by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church on numerous occasions.

That is why, in order to advance, the homosexual movement must blur the distinctions between virtue and vice; truth and error; good and evil. If this vice is imposed on our Armed Forces, it will necessarily bring this relativistic spirit with it.

In turn, this mentality would undermine the direct and straightforward mindset, so necessary to the military.It would sully the honor of all who serve and weaken society’s notion of the incompatibility between good and evil, so well represented by our Armed Forces.

I am really looking forward to seeing who those other "leaders of several major organizations" will be that will be joining TFP and Elaine Donnell at their press conference releasing this document tomorrow.