In the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Richard Socarides, a former adviser to President Clinton on gay issues, wrote that “recently we saw the potential beginning of an antigay fear campaign” over President Obama’s pledge to end the military’s discriminatory Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy. “Fortunately, these scare tactics are for the most part relics of an older era,” wrote Socarides. “People understand that our military needs every talented American it can get, and that excluding gays from the military detracts from our ability to win wars.”
But on Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio show Monday, Center for Military Readiness’ Elaine Donnelly, the right’s most prominent “crusader against gays in the military,” attacked Socarides column as “ludicrous,” noting that he “is open and professed as a gay person.” Donnelly particularly objected to Socarides argument that “men and women serve side by side today in combat, as do gay and straight service members, without incident,” saying that the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was an “incident” that resulted from allowing women to serve with men in the military:
DONNELLY: Ok, now how are we going to deal with four different sexual groups, say in Special Operations summaries. How’s that going to work? Or are we going to have the kind of military — and he clearly suggests this — he says yes, we have women in the military. We all support women in the military. However, he says that everything has been going on just fine without incident. Umm, what was that Abu Ghraib scandal all about? It started out as misconduct between men and women and then it steadily deteriorated into abuse of prisoners. The common denominator is lack of discipline. Once you break down discipline, good order and discipline and morale, everything that’s required for unit cohesion, you undermine the culture and the strength of the armed forces. This man obviously doesn’t get that.
During the interview, Donnelly also suggested that she believes openly gay men and women shouldn’t be allowed to teach in schools. When Gaffney claimed that repealing DADT was “a backdoor way” for “imposing” the gay rights agenda “on the rest of society,” Donnelly agreed, saying, “If it’s ok for the Marines then why is it not ok for the local school.” Listen here:
Though two of the guards who committed the abuse at the Iraqi prison were involved in a relationship at the time, Donnelly’s contention that their relationship was the root of the mistreatment is absolutely ridiculous. In 2008, the Senate Armed Forces Committee released a bipartisan report on the military’s detainee treatment policies, which concluded that “the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own“:
The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.
As journalist Mark Danner wrote after reviewing the military’s own reports on the scandal, the infamous abuse photos “were the brutal public face of behavior that involved many more people than the seven military police who were quickly charged.”
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Earlier this month, President Obama announced that he would ban the release of 
