June may be “the month of Pride” but this year the Cincinnati parade has coincided with July 4th, leading some conservative leaders to warn residents against traveling downtown for the traditional holiday celebrations:

“We think its not right for them to invade the Fourth of July, and we’re trying to warn people that if they do go downtown they may be exposed to some deviant behavior,” Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values. “Everything from sex in the streets to topless women.”…”It bothers me that they’re going downtown on the Fourth of July, and it has nothing to do with the July celebration. Nothing,” Burress said.

Parade organizers point out that “ninety-five percent of our parade entries are church organizations, student and university groups, political rights groups.” “They never want to focus on the reality of the GLBT community and the couples who have been together for 10, 15, 20 years,” parade organizer George Crawford said.

In fact, Crawford sees the date and the support the parade has drawn from local businesses as a measure of how far the city has grown in accepting the gay community. The last downtown event was in 1995, “and then there were no gay pride parades for five years.” “From 1993 until 2004, an amendment to the city charter prohibited city government from treating sexual orientation as a protected class.” This year, however, business leaders hung rainbow flags in their store fronts and promoted the event. “We invite people to come Downtown and see how much it’s changed,” Crawford said.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Last night, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee against Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Perkins regurgitated his concerns about Kagan’s opposition to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) and accused the nominee of opposing the military “because they have not yet bowed to the demands of the sexual counter culture.” “Her record would suggest that it’s not that Ms. Kagan does not want the military to defend our nation against terrorism, it’s just that she wants to use the military to advocate radical social policies more,” he said.

Perkins also took issue with Kagan’s characterization of DADT as “unjust” and argued that keeping openly gay and lesbian Americans from serving in the military “is the only sensible way to run a military organization”:

PERKINS: Of all of the moral injustices throughout history that man has inflicted on man, she equates them to a military policy enacted by Congress? Mr. Chairman, the purpose of our military is to fight and win this country’s wars….In war, the normal ways of living are completely sacrificed in the harsh and punishing environment of combat…military life by its nature must be characterized by regular lack of privacy and repeated situations of forced intimacy. As military experts have testified, and this Congress has affirmed, in such an environment it is not ‘a moral injustice of the first order’ to minimize the sexual exposure that such conditions force on soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. It is the only sensible and effective way to run a military organization.

Watch a compilation:

Perkins said that he “abhor[s]” discrimination based on race and other immutable characteristics,” but if you removed all of the references to homosexuality from Perkins’ statement and replaced them with descriptions of race or gender, it would mirror the arguments made by those who opposed President Truman’s integration of the military or the increasing role of women in combat. Their concerns were as unfounded then as Perkins’ are now.

In today’s military, men and women of all races, religions, and values train together, sleep in close quarters, and eat in the same mess halls without detriment to unit cohesion or military effectiveness. And foreign militaries that allow gays to serve openly in their forces — like those of Great Britain, Canada, and Israel — have shown that keeping gays out isn’t a very “sensible” or “effective way to run a military organization.” These nations did not build separate housing, shower, or other common-use facilities for gay and lesbian service members and haven’t experienced the kinds of doomsday scenarios and Perkins predicts.

In early June, the United Nations “leveled its fourth round of sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program,” which were hailed by President Obama as “the toughest sanctions ever faced by the Iranian government.” Yesterday, Obama signed into law “unilateral American sanctions on Iran that go beyond the penalties imposed by the United Nations last month.” The new U.S. sanctions “further restrict investment in Iran’s energy sector and cut off financing for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps” while cracking down “on federal contractors that do business with Iran.”

“We’re showing the Iranian government that its actions have consequences,” said Obama at the signing last night. Around the time that Obama was signing the law though, Sen. Scott Brown claimed on a right-wing Massachusetts radio show that the president refused to follow through on holding the Iranian government accountable with sanctions:

CARR: What do you think of this guy who stepped forward from the Justice Department, who was basically forced out by Eric Holder, the current Attorney General. And he says that they won’t, they won’t go after the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia even though, I mean, they didn’t even respond to the charges against them. The DOJ as you know had already won this civil case against them. And he says it’s just — and again, he’s a former high-ranking Justice Department official. He says this is just a case of racial politics by Holder and Obama.

BROWN: Well any time you have people breaking the law or influencing elections or really doing things that are inappropriate, you know, there should be repercussions. And there needs to be consistency. That’s kind of the problem with, with what I’m saying. The fact that they’re not making decisions. And if they make a decision, they don’t stick by it. For example, with Iran. You know, “we’re going to have sanctions! If you guys don’t do this by this date, you’re in trouble!” Ok, the date comes we don’t do anything. You know, “we’re going to have more sanctions, if you don’t do this, you know, you’re going to be in trouble.” And so, you need to, you need to stick to your guns and make sure you follow through and that’s not happening.

Listen here:

This isn’t the first time that Brown has launched an attack on the administration without the facts at hand. In his first press conference as a U.S. senator earlier this year, Brown declared that the “stimulus bill didn’t create one new job” and “Massachusetts has not created one new job.” In the quarter before Brown made those comments, the stimulus was estimated to have saved or created nearly 600,000 jobs. Vice President Biden’s spokesman Jay Carney told Fox News that “the Recovery Act has saved or created 53,000 total jobs in Massachusetts.”