DADT

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is to be honored by a far-right group whose leader has a history of comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler and attacking gays and lesbians.

Abbot is to receive an honor from two local affiliates of the U.S. Pastor’s Council, the Texas Pastor Council and the Houston Area Pastor Council. It’s unclear to what extent the groups are “groups”: all three share a website and are led by a single man, extremist pastor Dave Welch.

The groups are also planning to honor Paul Pressler, who helped lead the “conservative resurgence” within the Southern Baptist Convention. Former Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, who now works for Baylor University, is delivering the keynote address.

The Texas Freedom Network first noticed the event and highlighted Welch’s extreme rhetoric.

For example, Welch has:

• Argued that Obama is creating a “Fourth Reich.”

• Likened pastors who vouch for Obama’s Christian faith to Nazis and asserted that “Obama’s anti-Christian, anti-life, anti-marriage, anti-constitutional and anti-American policies” prove he only seeks to “use the church in the same way as a previous leader on a different continent,” Hitler. 

• Claimed the judge who ruled that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is unconstitutional is a treasonous “domestic enemy.”

• Referred to gays and lesbians as “forces of spiritual darkness” and a “morally depraved special interest group.”

• Said the election of openly gay Houston mayor Annise Parker, whom he called a “sodomite,” is a sign of a “cancer of the soul among the people” and that “we let our position on the wall be breached by the enemy.”

• Told the Daily Show that he wouldn’t support any Muslim candidate for Speaker of the Texas State House because he has “deep concerns about the loyalty of Muslims to the Constitution.”

But working with radicals like Welch is just part of the game for Texas Republicans, who continue to compete with each other to see who can be farthest to the right.

The Pentagon’s recent decision to extend certain benefits to the same-sex partners of service members following the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has provoked the ire of the American Family Association, which is upset that they may now be eligible for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

A new action alert from the AFA asks members to email their representatives in Congress, telling them that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has “effectively devastated our nation's military by allowing the ‘gay agenda’ to take priority over national defense.”

The AFA claims that homosexuality “presents an unacceptable risk to good order, discipline, morale and unit cohesion” and that the “most disturbing [thing] is his decision to allow homosexual partners to be buried on the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”

This means the military will recognize homosexual lovers as “married” and will give a full slate of benefits, including burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Panetta, at every turn, has exposed the military to open homosexuality, which presents an unacceptable risk to good order, discipline, morale and unit cohesion - qualities essential for combat readiness.

TAKE ACTION

Send a letter to your members of Congress, letting them know that, on their watch, they have allowed the security of our nation to be endangered by focusing on social experimentation, rather than defense.

Under your watch, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has effectively devastated our nation's military by allowing the "gay agenda" to take priority over national defense.

This week, his decision to grant "marriage" benefits to homosexuals in the military presents an unacceptable risk to good order, discipline, morale and unit cohesion - qualities essential for combat readiness.

Most disturbing is his decision to allow homosexual partners to be buried on the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

I urge you to do your part in restoring sanity to the Department of Defense and stop social experimentation in the military.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has joined American Family Association’s Buster Wilson in linking the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to the military’s suicide rate. Discussing the Pentagon’s new policy on allowing women to serve in combat units yesterday on his radio program, Perkins said that the Obama administration’s work in “driving Christianity out [and] putting homosexuality in” are “adding additional stress” that leads to a higher rate of suicide.

Perkins cited no evidence to back up his claim, but as with his ominous and incorrect predictions regarding the consequences of DADT’s repeal, he apparently doesn’t see a need to substantiate his outrageous allegations.

Perkins: The volume of these decisions coming out of this administration is unbelievable, unbelievable. The stress in our military, when you look how they have used the military for their social experimentation: driving Christianity out, putting homosexuality in, suicide rate going through the ceiling. I think it was last year if I recall the numbers there were 349 suicides in 2012 and I believe that’s more than were killed in combat, that’s the highest number since the Pentagon began tracking suicides back in 2001. And what are they doing? Adding additional stress by this social engineering. Unbelievable.

The last few years have been tough on Elaine Donnelly, as the Phyllis Schlafly protégé appears to have lost the battle over her group’s two main priorities: maintaining the ban on openly gay service members and excluding women from combat positions. Donnelly, the head of the Center for Military Readiness, appeared on Secure Freedom Radio last week with Frank Gaffney to demand that Congress intervene and block the Obama administration from permitting women to serve in combat.

She predicted that “lives are lost” if women have the opportunity to serve in such units, which she arged would make the military’s mission “more difficult [and] more dangerous.” “This is the political agenda of the President,” Donnelly said, “we see the outgoing Secretary of Defense planting on the Pentagon the flag of feminism right next to the LGBT gay activist flag.”

Gaffney: What does it mean for the war fighting capabilities of the United States that we are relaxing the standards or we are enabling people who will not be able to meet them to get access to and become part of the military cadre?

Donnelly: When you complicate matters in infantry battalions you make life and missions there more difficult, more dangerous, bottom line: lives are lost. There is no excuse for doing this. We know that women are promoted at rates equal to or faster than men and it’s been that way for decades. This is the political agenda of the President that is being imposed on the one institution or the one organization that he can order as Commander-in-Chief and everybody has to salute and make it work. That includes the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they are going along with this even though they have not disclosed the results of the marine tests. Now if the marine tests supported the goal of women being in the infantry, don’t you think we would’ve heard about it by now? Instead, we see the outgoing Secretary of Defense planting on the Pentagon the flag of feminism right next to the LGBT gay activist flag. These people are in charge of the Pentagon unless Congress intervenes and Congress has the responsibility to intervene. Under the Constitution, Congress makes policy, not the President, not the Joint Chiefs and certainly the field commanders who will have to implement these diversity metrics in order to get promoted.

Religious Right activist and gay exorcist Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt continued his venomous anti-gay campaign attacking Sen. Al Franken’s Student Non-Discrimination Act on City on a Hill Radio, which he argued would “homosexualize our schools” and “promote sodomy in our public school systems.”

Al Franken should not be in the U.S. Senate but anyway he’s promoting what they call, it’s misnamed, the ‘Safe Schools Bill’ which really is a ‘Sodomite Schools Bill,’ he’s trying to recruit and enforce homosexual education standards upon all fifty states to require that teachers facilitate what they call tolerance of sodomy, of sin, in the public school classroom. They want to teach children, not just in health education classes but as young as kindergarten, as young as first grade, that homosexuality is really not a sin, that it’s okay, that we should be tolerant, and if the teachers don’t teach those lectures they would lose their public school funding. So this is already a bill that’s gaining steam in the United States Senate, I think he has forty-two cosponsors who are U.S. Senators who are trying to homosexualize our schools, and we are demanding, in fact we are petitioning Congress and sending faxes after faxes, to stop the homosexual agenda and kill the Al Franken bill that would promote sodomy in our public school systems.

He warned that the Obama administration will soon allow gay and lesbian service members in relationships to collect “homosexual bonus pay” and “homosexualize base houses” and “have gay pride parades on the flight line” on air force bases. Klingenschmitt went on to maintain that gay couples adopting children are committing “child abuse” and only adopt with the goal of “recruiting them into the homosexual lifestyle.” “That’s why they’re trying to get into our kindergarten books and trying to take over our public schools and homosexualize our public education so that they can recruit children into homosexuality and maintain their pool of available sex partners for their own progeny,” he said, “which is our children that they are stealing and warping their minds.”

Right now as it is homosexual spouses for lack of a better word, what they think are spouses God thinks is an abomination, are not allowed to live in base housing, but you know the Obama administration is going to push for that in these next four years, they’re going to push for homosexual bonus pay. By the end of these four years if the Obama administration has their way and if the Republicans in Congress don’t stand up against this, they are going to homosexualize base houses, they’re going to have gay pride parades on the flight line, who knows what they’re going to be doing on air force bases and places around the world. I’m very concerned of course; adoption of any child by a homosexual couple is child abuse and children need to be protected from that. There have been studies out now that say up to twenty-eight percent of children who are raised by homosexual couples will become homosexual themselves so that’s a recruiting effort, it’s warping the minds of our younger generation, it is directly recruiting them into the homosexual lifestyle. Why? Because if they don’t recruit the children of heterosexual couples, they cannot replenish their population.

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The only way they have children is to recruit or in this case adopt the children of heterosexual couples which amounts to child abuse and child recruiting. That’s why they’re trying to get into our kindergarten books and trying to take over our public schools and homosexualize our public education so that they can recruit children into homosexuality and maintain their pool of available sex partners for their own progeny, which is our children that they are stealing and warping their minds.

Truth in Action Ministries has released their “2012 Issues Guide for Christian Voters” [PDF], which argues that federal spending on social services “goes against what the Bible says about caring for one’s own and others” and pushing for bans on abortion rights, stem cell research and emergency contraception. The group also warns of “radical judges” and an “out-of-control judiciary,” the “dangerous and destructive” health care reform law and the “false religion” of environmentalism.

But of course, no Religious Right voter guide goes without a section on gay rights, and Truth in Action Ministries tells members that END will “impose the homosexual political agenda on the workplace” and that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has started “Maoist-style ‘re-education’ in ‘diversity.’” The group also claims the repeal law will “violate the rights of those serving by forcing them to cohabit and shower with people who may desire them sexually” and “jeopardize the military’s health and blood supply, since homosexual men are far more likely to be promiscuous and to have STDs, including HIV/AIDS”

In 1996, Congress overwhelmingly enacted the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). But in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court struck down the state’s marriage law, and the state began issuing same-sex “marriage” licenses six months later, despite no change in the law. And in May 2012, a federal appeals court in Boston declared DOMA unconstitutional.

All candidates should be asked how they will defend marriage from this radical assault. It’s not enough to say they favor marriage if they also support same-sex “civil unions,” “domestic partnerships,” or “sexual orientation” laws, all of which incentivize homosexual relationships and devalue marriage. They should also be questioned about:

• The proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would impose the homosexual political agenda on the workplace;

• A constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union only of one man and one woman;

• New policies giving marital benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

Servicemen and women put their lives on the line. They deserve policies that ensure maximum military readiness and the best chance to win wars and return home alive. That’s why Congress overwhelmingly passed a law in 1993 incorporating as policy the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s ban on homosexual sodomy. But now the federal government has overturned “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” We believe this is profoundly immoral on several levels. It would:

• Hurt unit cohesion, morale, retention, and recruitment;

• Violate the rights of those serving by forcing them to cohabit and shower with people who may desire them sexually;

• Jeopardize the military’s health and blood supply, since homosexual men are far more likely to be promiscuous and to have STDs, including HIV/AIDS;

• Force chaplains to resign or to jettison God’s Law in favor of political correctness;

• Subject all personnel to Maoist-style “re-education” in “diversity.”

Likewise, Congress should resist any effort eliminate women’s combat exemption.

On this day last year, the military certified the repeal of the discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy after Congress overturned the policy. Religious Right activists warned that the military will suffer as a result, however, their ominous predictions failed to materialize as studies show that the new policy is working and benefiting the military.

Consequently, it wasn’t a surprise that anti-gay groups were largely quiet today on the anniversary as their warnings about an exodus of soldiers, a drop in enlistments and a return of the draft were clearly wrong.

Ron Crews of the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty released a statement that the “radical sexual agenda in our military” is leading to significant “negative consequences,” citing one example of possible sexual harassment, same-sex ceremonies on bases and the supposed “silencing” of chaplains and DADT supporters:

No Cause for Celebration: DADT Repeal Immediately Creates Major Problems for Service Members

Approaching the first anniversary of the repeal of the so-called DADT policy, mounting evidence demonstrates the negative consequences of implementing a radical sexual agenda in our military.

“The American armed forces exist to defend our nation, not as social experiment lab in which our troops serve as human subjects,” said Chaplain (Colonel Retired) Ron Crews, ED of CALL. ”While many will ignore the negative impacts, or pretend that they don’t exist, threats to our troops’ freedom are mounting.”

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“This list of problems and incidents that have arisen mere months after this administration imposed its will on the armed forces is disturbing to say the least, and we know it is only the beginning,” said Crews. “Compounding the outrage, service members are not free to speak out about these matters. This ensures that distrust in the ranks will increase and morale will decrease as the number of silenced victims grows.”

Focus on the Family’s political arm CitizenLink also said in a post quoting Crews and calling for Congress to pass a GOP-backed bill banning same-sex ceremonies on military property, which they said would preserve religious freedom by barring all chaplains from performing such ceremonies:

Crew said that a military religious freedom act introduced in January, House Resolution 3828, would help military personnel greatly.

“It’s a right-of-conscience clause that would provide protection to military personnel, so they would not be affected by their opposition to the repeal,” he explained.

If passed, H.R. 3828 would protect members of the Armed Forces who hold religious or moral convictions concerning “the appropriate and inappropriate expression of human sexuality” from discrimination or punishment for their beliefs.

The bill seeks to protect chaplains from being ordered to perform any services or ceremonies contrary to their faith, while preventing any same-sex marriage ceremonies from being performed on military posts, in accordance with the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, who predicted an increase in rape if the policy was repealed, pivoted away from his group’s hysterical claims to instead focus on possible same-sex marriages in the military, a result of the “radical sexual and social agenda” pushed by “homosexual activists.” Sprigg also cited a survey from the Military Times, but didn’t mention that the same poll found negative views of the repeal among service members are declining.

He also dismissed claims that the military would have “completely collapsed in the first year after repeal” since “our service members are too professional to allow that to happen,” but FRC president Tony Perkins did in fact predict the reinstitution of the draft and that congressmen who voted for the repeal will have “blood on their hands.”

Since eight servicemembers reported harm from both circumstances (a homosexual “coming out” and one joining their unit), a total of 36 separate individuals reported such harm. The Palm Center chose to emphasize that this was only 4.5% of all those surveyed—failing to mention that it represents twenty percent of those who had a homosexual “come out” or join their unit. Twenty percent represents a significant risk of harm for the units involved—merely to advance the goals of the sexual revolution. Damage to good order, discipline, morale, and unit cohesion need not be universal to be unacceptable.

In the same Military Times survey, 8.4% of respondents said that repeal made them less likely to remain in the military, while only 3.3% said it would make them more likely to remain.

The Palm Center report almost completely ignores the most significant harms that have become immediately apparent in the first year since repeal. Predictions that the use of the military to advance a radical social/sexual agenda would place us on a “slippery slope” have clearly come true. Furthermore, assurances given in the November 2010 report of the Pentagon’s Comprehensive Review Working Group (CRWG) regarding the limited impact of repeal have not been fulfilled. Since the CRWG report was to a large extent the basis for the Congressional vote for repeal in December of 2010, it can even be argued that repeal was adopted under false pretenses.

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Has America’s military completely collapsed in the first year after repeal? Of course not—our servicemembers are too professional to allow that to happen. The military is clearly being used, however, to advance a radical sexual and social agenda. The Palm Center cited one individual who stated that repeal “will help facilitate the slow cultural change towards greater acceptance” of homosexuality.

The purpose of our armed forces, however, is not to “facilitate cultural change.” It is to fight and win wars. By demanding that it do more than that, homosexual activists have undermined the single-minded focus that is necessary for military effectiveness.

As Republican leaders express their outrage at service members marching in a San Diego pride parade in uniform, Religious Right activists aren’t holding back either. In her radio alert yesterday, Mission America’s Linda Harvey accused the military personnel who marched in the parade of bringing “disgrace to the uniform and to America”:

Harvey: The San Diego homosexual pride parade on Saturday, July 21st, broke new ground. For the first time the Pentagon allowed members of the military to dress in full uniform at an event with a political agenda, and what an agenda it is. If you haven’t been to a pride parade recently, or ever, it’s not anything to be proud of. The uniform of our country was allowed to honor a display featuring men dressed as women, people in virtually no clothing at all and in your face advocacy of every aspect of homosexuality. How low will this present administration stoop before Americans say ‘we’ve had enough’? Here’s how the decision went down: there were concerns that some military members would march in uniform with or without permission so the big brass caved and said OK. Now think about that, because men and women who have taken an oath were planning to disobey standing protocol, their superiors decided to let them. The Pentagon says the exception is only for this parade but do any of us truly believe that?

This signals much more than an endorsement of deviance, it signals a breakdown of order. It’s also an exception that would not be extended to any groups but those on the left, could conservative soldiers appear in uniform at a Tea Party rally? Of course not, it’s only the homosexual lobby that gets this kind of deference. There were approximately three hundred service members signed up to march in this parade, that friends is a disgrace to the uniform and to America.

No debate about the military’s approach to gay and lesbian service members can be complete without a comment from Elaine Donnelly, who told Janet Parshall yesterday that participants wearing the uniform brought “discredit upon the Armed Forces”:

Later, Donnelly said the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell undermined the military’s commitment to “selfless service”:

Donnelly: Connect the dots here, how far is the military going to go with this? Well, frankly, they don’t know. Because the administration is saying that LGBT equality is a paramount concern, it is actually a political concern, the President is trying to deliver on political promises to his LGBT base, the left if you will, and the Pentagon is helping him do it.

Parshall: So stunning that there has been a historic set of rules of deportment of where and when that uniform can be used, and it seems to me and you have made this point several times over the last few years, that we are kind of making it up as we go along.

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Donnelly: This is a special interest faction. We don’t have in our military, we shouldn’t have, special interest factions. We don’t have labor unions either. You don’t have groups that are more interested in their own interests than they are in the selfless support for the institution, for the mission. Selfless service is what the military is all about. When you start dividing up into special interest factions that start saying ‘we want this and we want that and we are different from everyone else and we are more special than everyone else,’ that’s when you really invite problems. So Janet, this is just beginning, this is LGBT law in the military.

Ron Crews, the executive director of the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty and a former Republican politician, appeared alongside Family Research Council president Tony Perkins today on Washington Watch Weekly to push back against reports showing that only a small number of chaplains say they have been negatively impacted by the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. While the Religious Right’s prediction that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell would have catastrophic consequences on the military and national security contradicts nearly all of the evidence, Crews insisted that President Obama and his appointees are “turning our military into a social experiment to promote the cause of the homosexual agenda in this country” at “the expense ultimately of what our military is intended to do and that is to provide for the protection of this country, to defend this nation.” Later, Crews said that the military may experience a significant decline in “retention and recruitment” because parents will not want their children to serve in a “two-man barrack, a two person barrack, where they may be placed with a homosexual soldier.”

Perkins: The Department of Defense is kind of suppressing these differing views, only kind of giving a platform to those who are embracing this new policy, where do you think that pressure is coming from within the Department of Defense?

Crews: It’s coming from the very top. The senior leaders of the military are all presidential appointees, the senior attorney, Jeh Johnson, of the military is a presidential appointee. So these senior leaders fall in line with the president and his policy, who is turning our military into a social experiment, I believe, at the expense ultimately of what our military is intended to do and that is to provide for the protection of this country, to defend this nation. The current administration is turning our military into a social experiment to promote the cause of the homosexual agenda in this country. I am very concerned about the direction that the current administration has been leading our military over the last couple of years.

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Crews: The jury is still out. I’m concerned about long-term retention and recruitment. How many moms and dads are going to want their children to go into a military where their son or daughter may be in a barrack that they have no control over, in a two-man barrack, a two person barrack, where they may be placed with a homosexual soldier and they have no recourse, so we’re concerned.