As DADT Repeal Vote Nears Professional Homophobes Go Nuclear

Yesterday there was a lot of movement on the DADT front. It was announced that Ben Nelson and Robert Byrd would vote yes on a compromise version of the DADT repeal. The current compromise allows the vote on DADT repeal now, but delays implementation until after the Pentagon study on DADT implementation is completed and gives an additional 6 months for Congress to study the report. The vote on DADT repeal could come as soon as today or tomorrow.

With Nelson, Byrd and Collins on board the repeal is likely to happen. This has really energized the professional homophobes on the right. Their normal arguments about unit cohesion and love triangles didn’t seem to be working so their bringing out the big guns – gay Nazi death squads:

During a radio broadcast, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association explained:

So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

TPM gives us a bit of background for grounding purposes:

There is very little hard evidence that Hitler himself was gay — though a bevy of historians has examined the question. The iota of truth behind Fischer’s view is that several leaders of the SA — the tightly organized band of street brawlers hat helped Hitler rise to power — were gay. That included Ernst Rohm, the unit’s founder and leader. But after Hitler began to doubt the SA’s loyalty, Rohm was arrested on the “Night of Long Knives” in 1934, and executed soon after. The SA subsequently took a backseat in the movement to Heinrich Himmler’s SS, whose allegiance to the Fuhrer was unquestioned.

Of course, those of you who know history know that gay men suffered persecution during Hitler’s reign.

More than one million gay German men were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were serving prison terms as convicted gay men. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order

The estimates of how many gay men were sent to concentration camps vary between 5,000-15,000 with a death rate estimated at 60%. In fact, the holocaust is where the pink triangle symbol came from. It’s the badge that gay men were forced to wear in concentration camps.

Of course, rewriting history is not enough for the professional homophobes. The Family Research Council warns of an epidemic of gay rape if DADT is repealed:

Senior Fellow for Policy Studies Peter Sprigg delivered the results of what he said was the first-ever study of “homosexual assault” in the military. Joined by several former military officers opposed to allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, he warned Congress that the DADT repeal language currently under discussion with the agreement of the White House will turn the U.S. military into a terrifying free-rape zone where no heterosexual is safe.

“We are today releasing an analysis of publicly available documents which show that homosexuals in the military are three times more likely to commit sexual assaults than heterosexuals are relative to their numbers,” Sprigg said. “We believe this problem would only increase if the current law against homosexuality…were to be repealed.”

Here’s his report.

Their “analysis” says that less than 3% of Americans are gay, but 8% of military rapes are committed by gays. I don’t see any mention in their report on the extremely high amount of rape of women in the military (>40% of women in the military have dealt with some kind of sexual assault, according to reports). Does this mean we should ban heterosexual men from the military as well? How about if we make sure that rapists don’t join the military instead? We could do that by making reporting easier (and not career-ending) and by prosecuting vigorously.

It’s telling that the rhetoric from the homophobic right has changed from “gay people want to ruin your marriage and make you gay” to “gay people want to rape and kill you.” Obviously these “Family” groups have decided that their old ideas aren’t working so they are upping the ante. This is a dangerous turn of events because it could lead their fearful followers to acts of violence, believing they are acting in God’s best interest.