Desperate Religious Right Activists Say Military is Endangered by Having Service Members Share Barracks with Gay Soldiers

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.