Obama can stop DADT discharges

A new report says Obama has the power to stop gay military discharges without Congressional action.

Gay Military Ban Architects Admit Deception

And last night, things got even more interesting when Dr. Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Palm Center, went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and said “don’t ask” advisors now admit the policy was a deliberate deception based on no empirical evidence.
Frank, author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, told openly lesbian Rachel Maddow that military advisors to Clinton have admitted to the deception.
“They said it was based on nothing,” Frank told Maddow. “It was rooted in their own prejudices and fears. They even said they didn’t know what sexual orientation meant.”
“Instead they crated this unit cohesion argument. Which is the idea that openly gay service will somehow undermine unit cohesion and that you have to force service members to lie in order to preserve unit cohesion. Instead of the other way around, that forcing people to lie actually has its own impact on unit cohesion.”
Frank agreed with Maddow’s statement: “A key advisor to this panel admitted full-stop that the unit cohesion argument was completely made up out of whole cloth.” See Gay Military Ban Architects Admit Deception
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Fury Over Obama’s Gay-Affirming Justice Picks

Social conservatives are calling on Congress to reject several of President Obama’s picks to the Department of Justice, including the No. 2 position of deputy attorney general, because they support gay and lesbian equality and the right of a woman to have an abortion.

Republicans on Capital Hill grilled David Ogden, nominated to be the deputy attorney general, at length about those issues at his Thursday confirmation hearing, reports The Associated Press.

Ogden filed a brief in support of the gay defendants at the center of the 2004 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas which declared sodomy laws unconstitutional. Ogden has also defended organizations that support the right of a woman to seek an abortion.

“You’ve taken some very extraordinary positions, some left-leaning and unorthodox positions,” Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona, told Ogden.

Evangelical groups, including the ardently anti-gay Focus on the Family and the American Family Association, have objected to Ogden’s nomination.

Similar concerns are being expressed over the nomination of Elena Kagan to Solicitor General. Kagan, who is openly gay, is being denounced for her support of open service for gay military personnel.

See Fury Over Obama’s Gay-Affirming Justice Picks
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