Hullabaloo

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

 
Threats

by digby


In light of the teabaggers' crude outing of Lindsay Graham, I took a little trip down memory lane and revisited the history of the right wing attacks on gays as threats to national security. I guess that Mad Men craze has unfortunately put McCarthyism back in vogue.

The teabagger who outed Graham put it in classic terms:

“Sometimes I wonder what it would take to make a person sell their country out like that. There’s one thing that it could be, that I’m going to put out in the open here today. It’s a secret Lindsey Graham has… I hope this secret it isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham, so today I think Senator Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality.”

The logic there is that people are blackmailing Graham into selling out his country because he's in the closet. (In this case, they are talking about immigration reform, but it's always something.)

I'm frankly surprised they haven't used this argument to agitate against Don't Ask Don't Tell. But then, they know that the answer to this alleged blackmail threat is to allow people to openly serve, which wouldn't be the thing at all. How can anyone be blackmailed into selling out their country if they aren't hiding anything?

Well, now they're left with simply asserting that gays are "anti-national security" and leaving it at that. I guess it's supposed to be self-evident:

ThinkProgress obtained a letter the group sent to senators last week, which says that [Judge Marissa] Demeo is an “open, radical lesbian” who supports marriage equality:

As an open, radical lesbian, Demeo has openly condemned the effort to amend our Constitution to protect marriage as a one-man, one-woman union. Demeo supports gay marriage, claiming it is a constitutional right. She also claims that LGBT individuals are equal to racial minorities and can claim protection as minorities under our civil rights laws.

As a DC Superior Court Judge, Demeo would be in a key position to undermine our national security and destroy traditional marriage through her edicts. The DC Superior Court is known to be a steppingstone to the Supreme Court.

Demeo’s radical lesbianism, anti-marriage, anti-national security views are dangerous to our nation. She should not be confirmed to the DC Superior Court.

I don't know if there's something unrelated to her "radical lesbianism" that affects her "anti-national security views," but just stringing all that together in a sentence certainly implies it. It can't be that she's subject to blackmail since she's out, so they're just coming right out and saying that simply being a lesbian is a threat to national security. And that's actually what they've always thought.


.
digby 4/20/2010 05:00:00 PM |