LGBTQ: The Face of Hate

Copyright Melina Mara, The Washington Post

The wretched bag of vituperation pictured above is one Elaine Donnelly, the president of an organization called Center for Military Readiness (CMR), a 501(c)(3) organization whose sole purpose appears to be keeping women and gay people out of the military. Judging from the tone of this excerpt from their statement of "principles," they're sadly in need of some sensitivity training themselves:

To repair the damage, strong leadership and sound priorities will have to be applied in all matters, including personnel policies that impose heavy costs in return for little or no benefit. These include co-ed basic training, dcounter-productive gender quotas, double standards in training and disciplinary matters, misinterpretation of the law banning open homosexuality in the military, overly generous pregnancy policies that worsen deployability problems, and universal "sensitivity training" to convince everyone that social engineering "works."

A less charming bunch of troglodytes one is hard put to imagine. Ms. Donnelly somehow found herself invited to the Congressional hearings on the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy towards homosexuals in the military.

Washington Post's Dana Milbank covered the hearings, which were also attended by several gay troops. Given that this is the first hearing on DADT that has been held in the past 15 years, you'd think Ms. Donnelly could stifle the bile and present some facts rather than the steaming products of her fetid and clearly unpleasant inner workings. But no.

She ranted and raved and waxed so wroth it's nothing short of a miracle that her clearly botoxed and overpainted face didn't just fall off with disgust and crawl under a chair. In her own words, hear ye, hear ye:

Donnelly treated the panel to an extraordinary exhibition of rage. She warned of "transgenders in the military." She warned that lesbians would take pictures of people in the shower. She spoke ominously of gays spreading "HIV positivity" through the ranks.

"We're talking about real consequences for real people," Donnelly proclaimed. Her written statement added warnings about "inappropriate passive/aggressive actions common in the homosexual community," the prospects of "forcible sodomy" and "exotic forms of sexual expression," and the case of "a group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault" a fellow soldier.

Because, you know, all those lezzies are just dying to get some T&A shots in the showers. And what, exactly, is an "exotic" form of sexual expression? Doesn't this daft dunderhead realize, judging from the reports of rape and sexual harrassment in the military, that women are in much greater danger from their male comrades-in-arms than from shower photogs of the lesbian persuasion?

And forcible sodomy? Darlings, we're just not that into you, so to speak. Sorry to disappoint, but forcible sodomy is much more likely to occur in prisons or other concentrations of straight males who use sex as a means of asserting dominance and power. You know, just like heterosexual rape.

As for that "group of black lesbians who decided to gang-assault" a fellow soldier, Ms. Donnelly sounds much more focused on their blackness than their lesboness. There are plenty of existing procedures to deal with misconduct in the armed forces whether heterosexual or homosexual. What's got this woman's pantalones in such a wad, I wonder?

At any rate, she had the effect of getting Congresscritters' underroos in a similar bunch. Here's one of 'em:

Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) labeled her statement "just bonkers" and "dumb," and he called her claims about an HIV menace "inappropriate." Said Snyder: "By this analysis . . . we ought to recruit only lesbians for the military, because they have the lowest incidence of HIV in the country."

The Lesbian Army. Diamanda Galas would LOVE that.

Of course, the Washington Blade has considered Chris Shays a reasonably reliable backer of gay rights, but his performance at the hearing was the cherry on the sundae. He'd better watch it or his Republican buddies won't let him play with their toys.

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