I think Spencer Ackerman may be missing something when he highlights this complaint from John Boehner on repealing the prohibition on gays and lesbians serving openly in the U.S. military:
Boehner predicted that any action on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would lead to a “divisive debate” and “do nothing more than distract the real debate that should occur here about helping to get our economy going again and getting American people back to work.“As Richard Allen Smith from VoteVets points out, this could actually put thousands of gay and lesbian servicemen "back to work." Ackerman concludes that Boehner thinks gay service members "are either not American or inhuman." But here's what's interesting to me about Boehner's statement: Since when are Republicans concerned about "distracting" or "divisive" debates? It's what they live for.
The answer is that most of the country supports repealing DADT, and Republicans aren't eager to get into a fight that public opinion doesn't support them on and that will redefine the GOP as the party of homophobes for another generation. The other day Jonah Goldberg was fretting and doing backflips to avoid stating the obvious, that a debate over DADT would inflame the substantial homophobic presence in the Republican Party:
Obama wants to win back independents. And while I doubt that independents care very much — at least right now — about the issue, they also don't like big fights over gays. Stirring-up social conservatives and eliciting the inevitable harsh soundbites from, say, Pat Robertson would provide the White House with an opportunity to reprise the anti-talk-radio storylines of early last year (remember the whole White House v. Limbaugh fuss?). Whatever the merits of the issues, and fair or not, independents tend to blame conservatives for those sorts of debates.
Unlike marriage equality, the American people seem pretty straightforward on DADT: Not allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly is bigotry. They're uncomfortable with that. And the GOP is uncomfortable with cementing the impression that they are homophobes who aren't simply comfortable "maintaining the traditional definition of marriage" but who really want to exclude the LGBT community from as many aspects of public life as possible.
Goldberg concluded that "Obama and Pelosi aren't actually going to do anything about Don't Ask, Don't Tell for the foreseeable future." Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has barred the discharge of service members "whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners," and congressional hearings on repealing DADT start tomorrow.
-- A. Serwer
