Image above: Detail of mashup of John McCain in bed with Neil Patrick Harris. From (http://www.freakingnews.com/Quality-time-with-NPH-Pictures-53411.asp).
Back when Senator John McCain was a straight talker, he said that if military leadership ever told him that repealing "don't ask, don't tell" would be in the best interest of the forces, then he would change his views on the matter. That was then and this is now. Today, top brass went beyond what any currently-serving military leader has every said about discrimination against gays and lesbians. According to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, the gay ban "fundamentally undermines who we are" and repealing it would make the military better. Secretary of Defense Gates also said that the ban should be lifted. In response, Senator McCain and other Republicans fabricated phony arguments left and right. The 28 percent response rate to the military's survey on gays, they said, is too low and renders the results invalid. Forget the fact that that's about average for web-based as well as military surveys. Forget that any social scientist will tell you that response rates have nothing to do with the validity of a survey's results as long as the pool of respondents is drawn properly. In this case, the military's survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percent. Then Republicans said that they just want to be sure not to rush things. Rush!? The Pentagon has been studying the issue for almost a year. There were more than 20 prior studies, all of which found the same thing, that gay troops don't harm the military. "Don't ask, don't tell" was supposed to be a temporary compromise when it was enacted 17 years ago. And, the first soldier fired for gay sex was drummed out of the Continental Army more than 230 years ago! How much slower do the Republicans want to go? Then the Republicans repeated the only phony claims about combat effectiveness. Sure, a bunch of combat troops say that repeal would undermine combat effectiveness. But saying something is going to happen is not the same as showing that it is going to happen. Service members in foreign militaries also said that gays would undermine combat effectiveness, but when gay bans were lifted in those countries, there was no impact at all. And get this: of the 69 percent of U.S. troops who serve or suspect they serve with gays, 92 percent said that repealing the ban would not undermine their unit's ability to work together. If gays undermined combat effectiveness we would have seen that already in Iraq and Afghanistan (and for that matter, Kuwait, Vietnam, Korea, and World War II, all of which included openly serving gay troops). My favorite baloney of the day was the Republican talking point that the Pentagon Working Group failed to listen to the troops or ask them whether "don't ask, don't tell" should be repealed. Huh? The troops offered opinions on this and other topics in an on-line inbox that received 72,384 comments, in 95 face-to-face forums at 51 bases that included more than 24,000 troops, and in 140 smaller focus groups.
It is true that the survey did not include a question about whether the troops want repeal. But the troops had a lot of other opportunities to express that point. And we already know from three different polls, (Annenberg, Zogby, and Military Times) that approximately 40 percent of the troops oppose repeal, 30 percent favor it, and 30 percent don't know or don't care.
Why can't the Republicans just be honest? They don't care what is good for the military. They don't care about what the Secretary of Defense says. They don't care about what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says. They don't care about the data. They don't care about methodology. They don't care about process. They care about one thing and one thing only: prejudice. And when it comes to prejudice, all they want is more, more more.
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