As obvious from the debate over health care reform and the rush by the 112th Congress to take up repeal of that legislation as their first significant order of business, Republicans have no queasiness in taking out laws and legislation and various acts that they don’t agree with or that their ideology cannot tolerate.
So it goes with the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a victory of equality and justice (tepid at best, but a victory nonetheless) only a few weeks old and still yet to be fully implemented by an overly cautious Obama administration still intent on playing to the “center.”
With the 2012 presidential campaign season beginning to heat up and the tea party element in the Republican Party grabbing on to a choke-hold of the discourse on the right, GOP presidential prospects are already peddling a wish list of items they are promising will see a fight for repeal modeled after the current effort to obliterate the “ObamaCare” health care reform.
Social conservatives fumed as the law barring gays and lesbians from openly serving in the United States military came crashing down after a lengthy and overdrawn partisan fight.
Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a quintessential candidate that insists he is not a candidate, put that open service of gays in the military near the top of his “repeal” agenda.
He appeared on a popular conservative radio program produced by the notoriously anti-gay American Family Association. Saying there are “a lot of reasons” that DADT should remain in place (and proceeding to list “reasons” that are viscerally false), Pawlenty affirmed that he “been a public supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and I would support reinstating it as well.”
FISCHER: We just saw the ban on homosexual service in the military repealed, overturned. Conservatives will be working over the next couple of years to see that that ban is reinstated. If you become president in 2012, will you work to reinstate the prohibition on open homosexual service in the military? Would you sign such a prohibition if it got to your desk?
PAWLENTY: Bryan, I have been a public and repeat supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but if you look at how the combat commanders and the combat units feel about it, the results of those kinds of surveys were different than the ones that were mostly reported in the newspaper and that is something I think we need to pay attention to. But I have been a public supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and I would support reinstating it as well.
For God’s sake, why? How many votes do you hope to scrape up with this obvious pander? Nearly 80% of Americans support repealing DADT. Just let it be.