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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / Gay Rights are Human Rights / Kind of Surprising

Kind of Surprising

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This took me by surprise:

A big step forward for the push to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: Senator Ben Nelson, who has been aggressively lobbied for months by gay rights groups, is announcing that he’ll support the repeal compromise.

I figured we would lose Webb and Lincoln and Nelson and pick up Snowe, Collins, and maybe a couple other Republicans.

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  1. 1.

    The Moar You Know

    I suspect this will pass by wider margins, and a lot more easily, than most people are thinking.

    The GOP is hoping to use it like a boot to the hornet’s nest that is the teabaggers, so I expect no more than pro-forma opposition from them.

  4. 4.

    danimal

    The only hope for conservatives is avoiding a vote on the issue. If it comes up for a vote, a lot of them will vote “yes” (even if they really don’t like it cuz teh gays make them feel icky).

  5. 5.

    Comrade Jake

    What about Scott Brown? Has he come out one way or the other on this one? Or is he still in the closet?

  6. 6.

    Mike Kay

    this is about the armed services committee vote, not the floor vote. They want to win this in committee first. Nelson, Bayh, Byrd, and Webb are all on the committee and up to now, they were all on the fence.

    Scott brown (who’s on the fucking committee) says he will vote against it.

  7. 7.

    Keith

    This peeling off moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats is no way to jam a bill down the people’s throat, I tells ya.

  9. 9.

    Mike Kay

    @The Moar You Know:

    The GOP is hoping to use it like a boot to the hornet’s nest that is the teabaggers, so I expect no more than pro-forma opposition from them.

    Well, the house gop plans to vote in a bloc against the entire defense budget because of the amendment. All 176 of them. Every single last one of the them. even the closet gay gop congressmen, like Patrick McHenry.

  11. 11.

    Pamela F

    @Comrade Jake: Unfortunately, Scott Brown is a no which surprised me almost as much as Ben Nelson saying yes.

    It looks like Webb is going for a repeat when he was against women in the military.

  12. 12.

    Violet

    It’s crazy how insisting legislators legislate actually gets them to…legislate. That Obama and his crazy Jedi mind tricks!

  14. 14.

    middlewest

    Wow, it’s almost as if lobbying congress is more useful than chaining yourself to walls and yelling at the president. How strange.

  15. 15.

    Bulworth

    This peeling off moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats is no way to jam a bill down the people’s throat, I tells ya.

    And with only 80 percent support, ramming this bill down all our throats will mean that a 20 percent majority will be forced to have this bill rammed down their throats.

    And don’t tread on me! Also, too.

  16. 16.

    Mike Kay

    @middlewest: don’t forget freaking out on blogs.

    number one way to get the president’s attention is to write a freak out on a blog.

  18. 18.

    Comrade Dread

    I honestly thought that the GOP would have been more on board with this when those stories of the Arabic speaking soldiers getting booted out broke.

    I guess I learned that fear of teh gheys trumps fear of the teh Mooslims.

  19. 19.

    liberty60

    Like with immigration, gay rights is an issue in which the Talibangelicals/ Confederates have painted the GOP into a corner.
    Which is an artless seque into an off-topic link to Dana Milbanks column on the new GOP website, which is a treasure trove of hilarity.

    Sample suggestion from the wingnut faithful:

    “A ‘teacher’ told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish!” a third complains. “And the same thing about whales! We need TRADITIONAL VALUES in all areas of education. If it swims in the water, it is a FISH. Period! End of Story.”

    A decade ago I would have assumed this was Democratic pranking; after listening to Palin/ Bachmann/ Beck….I take it at face value.

  21. 21.

    El Cid

    What, did some gay billionaire offer to hire Ben Nelson on the board of a company after he retires?

  23. 23.

    scav

    @Violet:

    It’s crazy how insisting legislators legislate actually gets them to…legislate.

    weird, isn’t it? You’d think there were like, branches of government and all.

  26. 26.

    Jim C.

    No way you lose Lincoln at the moment.

    Before she found herself in a run-off in the Democratic primary, you’d absolutely lose her because she’d be thinking about being reelected in a conservative, red state.

    Now she needs to court liberals and others who vote in Democratic primaries. She’ll vote in favor of this out of a desire for survival.

  27. 27.

    scav

    @liberty60: I can’t wait for the ducks and the turtles’ take on this.’ Still, there is a tradition of this sort of logic to get around the prohibitions of fasting. Such as, the strange and wonderful generation of the Barnacle Goose. Well, here too, don’t want anyone to miss the actual floating on water stage

  29. 29.

    MikeJ

    @liberty60: This web site sounds like great fun to play with. I think I’ll be making many suggestion right after I press the TOR button on my browser. (Warning: while tor anonymizes, it makes stuff slooooooooow. LIke really slow. Slowity slow slow. But you ip isn’t attached to anything you do.)

  30. 30.

    Lee

    I was really hoping Webb would change on this.

    Yes he was also against women in the military way back in the 70’s. He eventually changed his mind (IIRC he eventually became a big supporter of women in the military…but I might be thinking of someone else).

    I was hoping he would change it a little quicker this time.

  31. 31.

    Martin

    @liberty60:

    A decade ago I would have assumed this was Democratic pranking; after listening to Palin/ Bachmann/ Beck….I take it at face value.

    Most of the ones I read are spoofs. Two tells:

    1) Limited use of the Jesus key.
    2) All the words are spelled correctly. Conservatives think the red squigglies give the words extra emphasis.

    And if any of them end in Also., it’s clearly, obviously a spoof, and a rookie at that.

  32. 32.

    Butch

    @dmsilev: I wouldn’t be completely sure it’s satire. There’s an article in today’s Denver Post about a group in Grand Junction that took a petition to the local school board demanding that global warming no longer be taught in science class, because it’s “unproven” and “scares the kids.”

  33. 33.

    Sly

    @dmsilev:

    I once ran across a guy who insisted that whales are fish because of the story of Jonah. The logic went that because both the original Hebrew manuscripts and the KJV translations of the Bible described the thing that swallowed Jonah as a “great fish” and a “whale,” respectively, and that the KJV is a perfect translation of the infallible word of God (who speaks Hebrew, I guess), whales were, by necessity, fish. That they breathe air, have warm blood, and nurse their young via mammary glands was all incidental. God said it was a fish and a whale so it must be both.

    So I’ll assume that the comment was simple nutpicking. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was genuine.

  34. 34.

    middlewest

    Poe’s law (religious fundamentalism) — “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

  37. 37.

    Jay C

    @Mike Kay:

    Yeah, but you know, a vote against repealing DADT is actually a vote for…..

    HITLER!!!!!

    At least according to a spokesman for the American Family Association:

    Hitler Used Gay Soldiers Because They Had ‘No Limits’

    One Mr. Bryan Fischer explains:

    So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn’t the Germans, didn’t the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals.

    If it weren’t “so gay”, I’d suggest Mr. Fischer has seen one too many reruns of “Cabaret” (or didn’t realize that it wasn’t a documentary)…..

  40. 40.

    jonas

    Interesting: Lindsay Graham’s website just posted a statement saying that he’s opposed — but mostly just because he doesn’t like the idea of voting to repeal DADT, and then seeking feedback from the military on implementation.

  41. 41.

    JMY

    But, but, Obama didn’t use his executive powers just like Bush to get rid of DADT. Worst president EVAH!

  42. 42.

    BombIranForChrist

    Let’s wait and see how dude actually votes.

    I predict a bait and switch.

  44. 44.

    mvr

    This is the kind of thing that brings me around to vote for BN, even while I’m grinding my teeth about the other stuff he’s done. I suppose Hagel might have wound up voting for something like this as well. But Nebraska isn’t going to elect any Republicans half as sane as Hagel in the next decade. So BN is a good bit better than our other options.

  45. 45.

    Karl

    Oh come on. Lindsey’s opposed because he doesn’t want to lose best excuse ever to stay in the closet (he’s an Air Force JAG.) Or more charitably he thinks icky gays should be careful not to make the straights uncomfortable.

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