DADT isn’t dead–just sleeping!

I originally posted this at Out & About Magazine this morning, but I really wanted to share it with you all because I think its important to clear up the misinformation. I’m posting it in part here–but you should still hop over to my blog there and support independent rural downstate Illinois gay media!

…It seems like we lost the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fight yesterday when Senator John McCain successfully led a filibuster against the Defense Authorization bill that contained repeal provisions. However, its important to remember the bill isn’t dead. There was no vote on the bill itself, only a vote on whether or not to call the bill to the Senate floor for a vote. Yep, the Senate has to vote to vote. Yeah, and we wonder why nothing gets done.

Anyhow, the bill can still be called. There’s still some danger, though. Republicans will again halt the bill if none of their concerns with how the vote went down aren’t addressed. This means that aspects of the bill are going to be up for negotiation–including the controversial amendments like the DREAM Act, the legalization of privately funded abortions in military hospitals and–of course–Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal.

Its important to note that, although John McCain’s problem with the bill was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, that wasn’t everyone’s problem. In fact, most Republicans weren’t even thinking about DADT at all. Republicans like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Democratic (barely) Senator Blanche Lincoln were angry about Majority Leader Reid’s move to block any more changes to the Defense Authorization and close it off from any more amendments. While many have noted this might have been a choice to protect the DADT repeal, ultimately it harmed it by preventing a vote on the Defense Authorization bill. In the end, the votes are there in the Senate for the National Defense Authorization Act with the DADT repeal. As long as we can get it to a vote.

What’s it going to take to get it to a vote, though? Its going to take opening the bill up to Republican amendments. If this is the case, we risk subjecting the bill to amendments that water down the repeal language. If some Republican proposed such an amendment, however, it would have to be accepted by majority vote–which would be a hurdle for Republicans as the Senate has been inundated with calls to go ahead and pass the repeal.

In fact, we can bet that the NDAA will pass the Senate. The Republicans’ pro-Military image would take a massive hit if the Department of Defense is de-authorized over a policy that 75-80% of Americans are in support of lifting.

This now turns into a game of chess. Or rather, more likely, a game of chicken. Its going to turn into who is going to flinch first. Because the Republicans won’t allow it to come to a point where they throw the entire Department of Defense into upheaval over this. But they’ll drag this out as long as they can until they get as much of what they want as they can.

Our role. We must keep up the pressure on the Senate to tell them, of all the changes to make, not to water down the DADT repeal. Of all three amendments, this has the most widespread support in the American public, we can save it. We must also tell our Democratic leadership to open up and allow Republicans to add amendments.

Don’t flush DADT repeal down the toilet yet. It’s not dead. It’s just in a coma on life support with a grim prognosis.

PS, why did I use the goldfish image? Here is how I started the piece over at Out & About Illinois Magazine:

Being adopted by my sister has to be some sort of punishment for pets with bad karma. She’s not a particularly good caretaker. Our backyard is littered with the graves of turtles, fish and hermit crabs.

One such fish was one I won for my little sister at a church festival. As was her usual habit, she greatly neglected “Goldie” until he took ill and she was suddenly very concerned.

Goldie looked quite dead when I saw him, floating in the bowl. I was getting ready to flush him. Then I saw his one fin twitch. I tapped the bowl, and suddenly he started alternating floating and swimming on his side using one fin.

We tried aerating the bowl as much as possible. Goldie began to spend more time swimming sideways than floating. For the next few months, Goldie never seemed to regain the use of the other side of his little goldfish body, but he did live. Every day, we thought it would be Goldie’s last day. Every day, he’d float up to the top of the bowl and lie there motionless, and every day we’d tap the bowl and he’d start fumbling around sideways again.

Millions of toddlers have found their goldfish floating in their bowls and been told by their parents “he’s just sleeping.” Well in my sister’s fish’s case, it turned out to be true.

Let’s revive this fish!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Politics & Activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.