Last month, General David Petraeus suggested that he may be open to supporting a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Petraeus said that he was “not sure” that most servicemembers would care about fighting alongside openly gay men and women, and that he has personally done so without any problems.

Yesterday, during an appearance on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Petraeus clarified that he served with two gay CIA officers whose orientation did not undermine their performance or mission and promised to lay out his “thinking on the matter” before the Senate Armed Services Committee this spring:

PETRAEUS: I would like to clarify what I did say. What I said is I served with CIA officers actually who were known to be gay and one who was known to be lesbian. After the ten seconds of awareness wore off, the focus was on the professional attributes of these individuals. So given, again, standards of personal conduct, focus on human behavior, a focus on proper implementation, you know, I think that this is something that can be worked through, frankly. I’ll lay this out to Congress. My thinking on this matter, I’ve been wrestling with this. [...]

ZAKARIA: It sounds to me, though, if these — if the review process of scouting out the opinions of soldiers, if they were to go to this soldier, that is, you, it sounds like what you would tell them is that under — as long as it was carefully implemented, you would be comfortable?

PETRAEUS: I’ll lay that out, again, to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Watch it:

Lawmakers will have to wait for Petraesus’ testimony before adding him to the ‘military leader who supports repeal’ column, but these statements suggest that the general is at least skeptical about the policy. His answer also betrays a certain level of indifference towards a soldier’s sexual orientation — reiterating the fact that repeal is only controversial in the minds of conservative fundamentalists — and mirrors the reaction of General Raymnd Odierno, the current Commanding General of forces in Iraq. Last month, Odierno was “asked repeatedly” about his stance on the gays in the military, until he finally told reporters, “I don’t have time to think about it…we’re kind of busy right now, trying to do our job in Iraq.”

Significantly, in the seventeen years since Congress passed DADT, real world experiences and the multitude of Defense Department-funded studies on the effects of the policy have convinced former proponents of DADT (i.e. military leaders) to come out against it. Support for the policy has been largely relegated to the most fundamentalist but well organized elements of the conservative movement. And fortunately, these groups and their rhetoric won’t provide cover for undecided moderate lawmakers.

Lawmakers in Florida are hoping to pass a $75 million incentive package to attract movie studios to film in Florida, but a little noticed provision could deny tax credits to movies that feature gay or other “nontraditional family values.” The Entertainment Industry Economic Development Act seeks to revise the current incentive program — which already offers a tax credit worth 2% of a movie’s production costs if it is “family friendly” — to specifically exclude movies that depict “nontraditional family values” from receiving the additional credit. Here is the relevant provision:

A certified production determined by the Commissioner of Film and Entertainment, with the advice of the Florida Film and Entertainment Advisory Council, to be family-friendly…Family-friendly productions are those that have cross-generational appeal; would be considered suitable for viewing by children age 5 or older…and do not exhibit or imply any act of smoking, sex, nudity, nontraditional family values, gratuitous violence, or vulgar or profane language. Under the current incentive program, review of the final release version is not required and nontraditional family values, gratuitous violence, and implied acts do not exclude a film from receiving this additional credit.

State representative Stephen Precourt, whose district includes Disney World, says the purpose of the credit is to encourage movies to depict cinematic life from the 1960s. “Think of it as like Mayberry,” Precourt told the Palm Beach Post News. “That’s when I grew up — the ’60s. That’s what life was like. I want Florida to be known for making those kinds of movies: Disney movies for kids and all that stuff. Like it used to be, you know?” Precourt claims that his provision does not specifically target movies with gay characters but “asked if shows with gay characters should get the tax credit, he said, ‘That would not be the kind of thing I’d say that we want to invest public dollars in.’”

Florida’s gay rights groups are accusing Precourt of subsidizing “discrimination” and marginalizing gay families. Indeed, some studies have found that positive portrayals of gay characters can help shape viewers’ attitudes toward homosexuality. One 2002 study concluded that “watching a film about a nontraditional family with homosexual characters resulted in greater acceptance of homosexuality. In addition, German adolescents exposed over the course of a week to talk show segments featuring discussions of homosexuality later expressed more accepting attitudes toward homosexuals than did adolescents in the control group.”