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 measure of how far the city 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.

Media Matters catches a bit from yesterday’s Hannity show that demonstrates how completely unhinged the right has become on the Kagan nomination. During his interview with Newt Gingrich, Hannity regurgitated many falsehoods but none as silly as his claim that Kagan wants to tell Americans “what to eat”:

HANNITY: Yes. Well, I’m wondering, for example, watching the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan. I mean, you know, the more I hear from her, she says she’s a progressive. She says she’s a liberal Democrat. She has no experience on the court.

She’s openly talked about the idea that the Supreme Court, it would be acceptable to her that the government can write laws and legislation and it wouldn’t be unconstitutional telling Americans what to eat….Do you think the Republicans should pick a fight here and should she be filibustered?

Watch it:

Hannity is referring to this exchange in which Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) asks Kagan whether it would violate the Commerce clause if Congress passed a bill requiring Americans to “eat three vegetables and three fruits, every day.” Kagan replies that she considers such laws “dumb” but would rely on precedent surrounding the Commerce clause to decide if they were constitutional.

The naive blogger in me wants to say that Hannity simply misunderstood Kagan’s answer, but the cynic sees that the answer makes no difference; it’s the question that matters. Throughout the hearing, Coburn and the other conservative senators were fishing for quotable soundbites to use on cable news and in fundraising letters. Hannity is amplifying their message and helping to rally the base.

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 I suspect that 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 extremely 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.