By: Paul S. Marchand
If you’ve been out of the closet for twenty-plus years, and if you live in a community where between a third and two fifths of the population is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, it can be easy to get blasé about National Coming Out Day.
So I’d like to thank House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, the Republican -and Mormon- Congressman from California’s 25th District for reminding me why NCOD still matters. Today’s edition of The Hill reports that McKeon “would rather go without a defense spending bill this year than compromise on allowing military chaplains to conduct gay marriages.” (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/186363-house-armed-services-chair-i-wont-compromise-on-gay-marriage-detainees)
So, let me get this straight, all puns intended.
McKeon would harm and hamstring this nation’s entire defense in order to push his personal anti-queer agenda.
I must be in an alternate universe. I thought it was the Republicans who were supposed to be the hawks, while Democrats were supposed to be dovish wusses, unable to commit to our national defense.
But no, McKeon apparently really does believe that anti-queer bigotry is more important than making sure that our nation has a defense capability.
Whose side is he on?
Certainly not the side of America, that’s for sure.
A Congressional back-bencher, a Mary Bono Mack or a Michelle Bachmann, for example, might be allowed a little leeway in making crazy pronouncements; Bono Mack is considered little more than a lightweight, and Bachmann’s appeal to her like-minded base has little crossover appeal to rational America.
Howard “Buck” McKeon, on the other hand, does not -or should not- have the luxury of crazy talk. As a committee chair, he should understand that his utterances carry weight, and that he owes the nation a higher duty than sacrificing the national security of the United States to his personal, religiously-motivated, ideology.
I guess you could say I’m a little angry.
I’m angry not just because I’m tired of social and religious conservatives insisting that America needs one last minority against whom it should be legal to discriminate; I’m tired of the lavender Jim Crow of Buck McKeon and his ilk.
I’m also angry because Buck McKeon happens to be a senior member of a religious denomination that contributed millions to Prop 8 campaign whose clear intention was to keep us uppity queers as far in the back of the bus as possible.
Finally, I’m angry because I believe the defense of the United States should never, repeat never, be held hostage to ideology so crudely or so cynically. We do have enemies who wish us ill, against whom this nation must be defended. More importantly, we have servicemembers whose livelihoods and well-being depend on passing the defense authorization bill, livelihoods and well-being that are too important a thing to be treated as a political football.
The double standard Mr. McKeon and his fellow travelers apply to their own actions is reprehensible. If a Democratic House committee chair had even suggested holding up the annual defense authorization, even for a compelling and justifiable reason, the Republicans would be screaming “treason,” or worse.
Yet, by McKeon’s lights, the thought of an armed forces chaplain joining Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David is so awful as to justify laying this country open to its enemies and starving its defenders. We would be right to question -and we should question- such a person’s patriotism and commitment to this country, to say nothing of questioning his fitness to serve in the Congress.
Whose side is he on?
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he lives and works. The views expressed herein are his own, including his view that Howard McKeon is an embarrassment to the Golden State.
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