During an appearance on the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch Weekly radio program on Friday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) likened homosexuality to ‘adultery’ and suggested that gay people wouldn’t be able to control their hormones if allowed to serve openly in the armed forces:

GOHMERT: Some people say, “Where is homosexuality in violation of the Ten Commandments?” Well it’s adultery, it’s sexual relations outside of marriage, a man and a woman ….. specifically for the military, when anyone, whether their homosexual or heterosexual, cannot control their hormones to the point that they are distraction[s] to the good order and discipline of the military, then they need to be removed from the military. [...]

PERKINS: What happens if the courts or even congress — that is currently debating this issue — changes the policy? Will that not ultimately lead, if you have to say homosexual behavior is acceptable — would not then the policies have to be changed or the laws, rather changed about heterosexual immorality?

GOHMERT: Well of course it would.

Listen:

These comments only add to Gohmert’s long list of homophobic remarks. Last year, Gohmert called the DADT repeal “perverse…social experimentation” and said that soldiers are being “held hostage by a sociological attack.” His rant included a bizarre argument that the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill would lead to a legalization of necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality and said that taking away “moral teaching in America” would create a situation similar to that of Germany in the “1920′s and 1930′s” when a “little guy with a mustache” took over.

On a substantive note, as CAP’s Larry Korb points out, DoD should implement a broad code of social conduct that covers all personal relationships and behavior that undermine good order and discipline, whether they’re the fault of gay or straight soldiers. (H/T: Good As You)

During a conference call hosted by the National LGBT Bar Association about the government’s recent decision to appeal a recent federal court decision which barred the military from enforcing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Walter Dellinger — acting United States Solicitor General for the 1996-1997 Term of the Supreme Court — outlined a third middle ground that would allow the government to honor its duty to defend existing laws, but also register the administration’s opposition to the policy.

Dellinger recommended that the government allow the DOJ to appeal the policy, but argue that it believes it to be unconstitutional:

DELLINGER: I think it is certainly possible for the President going beyond merely expressing policy disagreements….but we need to distinguish between two senses of unconstitutional. You can say it’s unconstitutional in a predictive sense, that you predict it will be stricken down, and I don’t think you can say it in this case, because the Supreme Court is up for grabs on that issue. But there is also a sense that you can say the law is unconstitutional because you’ve reached your own judgment about the facts of the world that can render the law unconstitutional.

The theoretical rule is that a law that infringes on liberty …is only constitutional if it advances a governmental purpose. Now, the Solicitor General would assume that Congress can decide the military purpose and here Congress has decided that it advances a military mission…but the President, as Commander in Chief, can make his own judgment that it is not necessary and if he concludes as he has said that it’s harmful to the national defense, then in his belief he doesn’t have to give deference to the political branch, he is a political branch. [...]

Dellinger explained that the President — represented by the Justice Department — can go into court and argue that “it’s our understanding that this policy doesn’t advance the national interest and that’s what the Chiefs have said.” At that point, the government would be only technically defending the statute, and allow other parties to submit amicus briefs arguing in favor the policy.

This kind of strategy has some legal precedent, Dellinger continued. “In two cases cases, one from the Reagan administration and one from the George H. W. Bush administration, the government appealed cases, but gave its own view that the law they were defending is unconstitutional…and in both cases a 5-4 court disagreed with the government’s position and upheld the act of Congress.”

In this case, Obama would ask the Court to rule that the policy is, in fact, unconstitutional. “I think there are enough instances where the government has done that,” he said. “This is a middle ground between unilaterally not complying with the law and going in an actually defending, arguing that it’s constitutional.” He explained that in this way, the government would also avoid making “malicious” or “homophobic” arguments that are often made by certain conservative organization. “Once you get rid of those arguments, you get down to making arguments that are sort of weaker and weaker and you can be accused by critics of the administration from the right of throwing the case not doing the job. It’s almost better to be candid about it and say…. we’re just going to flat out say, there is not a sufficient government justification for this discrimination and burden….[but] we’re going to give the court the last word.”

Politico’s Josh Gerstein notes that the White House originally intended to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell over a two-year period, following an agreement with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that would have led to legislative action only after the Pentagon’s Working Group released its report in December. From the very beginning, the White House — learning from President Clinton’s failed effort to push for a policy of open service — had deferred the repeal strategy to the Pentagon, but many Democrats and LGBT advocates actually forced the White House to change its overly cautious policy:

“The deal we understand was made between Obama and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates was that it would be a two-year process,” said one gay rights activist who talks regularly with White House officials and asked not to be identified. [...]

What the White House’s slow-but-steady approach failed to anticipate was the rise of online activism by repeal advocates and the impatience those advocates would show based on polls indicating as many as 75 percent of Americans support “don’t ask” repeal. While many organized gay groups deferred to a greater or lesser extent to the White House’s strategy and timeline, bloggers like John Aravosis and in-your-face protesters like Dan Choi did not. The online activists and upstart groups never bought into the wait-for-the-Pentagon approach, even after Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented historic testimony in February endorsing an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

And after Democrats began to suffer electoral defeats earlier this year in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, gay advocates began to fear that Obama’s plan to defer legislation on the subject to 2011 might doom the repeal effort altogether if Republicans took one or both chambers of Congress. [...]

The White House’s Plan A involved a Pentagon study for release in December 2010, followed by legislation thereafter. But in May, advocates won the White House’s public support for conditional repeal legislation that attempted to work around the next-Congress problem by giving Obama, the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs power to end the policy when the studies were complete.

Even that contingent plan was awkward for the White House, since it upended Obama’s initial agreement with Gates, who faces service chiefs staunchly opposed to repeal. “It started getting real messy,” said one person close to the talks. “The president was in a very tough spot.”

The administration remained mum as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insisted in February and then again in April that the review should help inform the legislative process and maintained that Obama was committed to letting the group complete its work before moving forward. The White House has been reluctant to lobby moderate senators to include repeal legislation in this year’s defense authorization act and at times appeared unfamiliar with the different strategies for ending the policy this year.

For instance, it wasn’t until May 24th — three days before the House voted to include a gradual repeal amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act — that the the White House issued a statement in support of the amendment. The statement came only after the WH won the approval of Gates, who issued his own a terse endorsement of the gradual repeal approach shortly thereafter.

And the White House still appears deferential. In its decision to appeal the recent federal court ruling, the administration echoed the Secretary’s suggestion that a drawn out repeal process would actually help gay soldiers. Ending enforcement of the policy “before the appeal in this case has run its course will place gay and lesbian servicemembers in a position of grave uncertainty,” the government wrote in its appeal request. “If the Court’s decision were later reversed, the military would be faced with the question of whether to discharge any servicemembers who have revealed their sexual orientation in reliance on this Court’s decision and injunction.”