Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyDecember 23rd, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Vector (San Francisco, CA), December 1973, page 48.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Rep. Dannemeyer’s Op-Ed Against Gays in the Military: 1991. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers, has been gone since 2011 (see Sep 20), and the controversy surrounding gays serving openly has largely disappeared. But in 1991, the debate was well underway over whether the Defense Department should rescind its decades-long policy of prohibiting gays in the military. In the pre-DADT era, the ban was a matter of DoD policy, not the law. Conservatives then, as now, wanted to keep the ban in place, and few were more hard core about it — or more obnoxious — than Rep. William “Wild Bill” Dannemeyer (R-CA). On December 23, 1991, he was true to form in his op-ed lambasting gay people with his usual class:
A very poor joke asks: What is meaner than a pit bull with AIDS? The guy who gave the dog AIDS, of course. This could be the fightingest son-of-a-gun in the whole Army. But should he be?
I have seen how aggressive the lunatics of ACT-UP can be-rioting in the streets, smashing windows, fighting with anyone in disagreement-and have often thought how effective they might be on the front lines of combat. But does this prowess and compunction for destruction automatically certify the few and the proud?
…Many people still believe that homosexual sodomy is a perverse behavior, that someone choosing to do so isn’t playing with a full deck. Survey after survey of military personnel supports this belief. …For homosexuals to blame others for reacting adversely to their chosen lifestyle is absurd. The notion of punishing “homophobes” (the label applied to people who find homosexual sodomy repugnant) in the military as perverts rather than those persons who define their very existence by a sex act is itself perverse…
Those were the arguments against gays in the military in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton ran for President, he promised to overturn the ban. But as soon as he was sworn into office, he ran into a buzz saw of opposition led by fellow Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. In 1993, Congress shifted the ban from administrative policy to legal imperative with the passage of the Defense Authorization Bill, which included the codification of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law. According to Servicemembers United, 14,346 soldiers, sailors and airmen/women would be discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” over the next eighteen years.
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