Dumbfuckery du Jour

My darlings, I feel like dog meat, and I'm not talking the gourmet you-can-practically-serve-it-in-a-restaurant variety, but the cheap-ass Wal-Mart variety that's likely got more bits of gristle, fat and bone fragments than existed in the actual animal kind.  Yup, Aunty Flow's on the way, and bringing with her all of the aches, pains, hot flashes, and terminal exhaustion she can muster.  It makes it all too easy to look at the floods of stupidity pouring forth from our right wing and say, "Fuck it, I'm going to bed.  Forever."

I'd meant to pull together the remarkable examples of utterly outrageous anti-gay rhetoric pouring forth like explosive diarrhea from the rabid right, but I didn't have the energy.  Thankfully, Steve Benen did:

Unable to come up with compelling justifications for an expensive, discriminatory policy that undermines military readiness, religious right groups have gone off the deep end.

Here's how the Family Research Council envisions things going if Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed: first, more straight soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines will be fellated in their sleep against their will. Then, commanders afraid of being labeled homophobes will refuse to do anything about it. Eventually, the straight service members will quit out of fear.

On a conference call with reporters today, FRC Senior Fellow for Policy Studies Peter Sprigg delivered the results of what he said was the first-ever study of "homosexual assault" in the military. Joined by several former military officers opposed to allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, he warned Congress that the DADT repeal language currently under discussion with the agreement of the White House will turn the U.S. military into a terrifying free-rape zone where no heterosexual is safe.

The Family Research Council, which is a religious right powerhouse, has quite a case. As the right-wing group sees it, 8.2% of sexual assaults in the military were homosexual in nature. (I have no idea if that's true, and it's best not to take the FRC's word for it.) FRC added that less than 3% of the national population is gay (again, a dubious number). Ergo, gay soldiers commit more sexual assaults than straight soldiers, and ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" would unleash a wave of gay sexual predators who will terrorize American fighting forces.

Who could argue with logic like this?

It wasn't just the Family Research Council. The FRC's friends at the American Family Association have begun pushing the line that Adolf Hitler was gay, and he recruited "homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers," because Hitler believed that only gay soldiers "had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after."

That last one really made me laugh, because I'd been under the impression that the FRC and its fellow travelers hated teh gayz because they don't make bebbies and don't act like manly men.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they also believe gays are killing machines par excellence.  After all, this is a crowd that has plenty of practice clinging to mutually-exclusive ideas and are experts in losing all contact with reality.

Steve, alas, missed some of the best hysteria on offer:

Today, right-wing hate-monger Cliff Kincaid’s group America’s Survival launched a repulsive fear campaign against repeal, warning that “disease-tainted gay blood threatens our troops.” The group’s abhorrent video — and the 60 page report that accompanies it — present ludicrous stereotypes of gay men and women, going so far as to claim that “open and active homosexuals into the U.S. military could very well result in the spreading of deadly HIV-tainted blood throughout the ranks”

[snip]

Kincaid goes on to warn that repealing DADT will lead to “transgendered individuals who want to dress up as members of the opposite sex and would cry ‘discrimination’ if they are not allowed to do so.” Ignoring the fact that service members of both genders often wear identical uniforms, Kincaid’s only example of this allegedly real threat is a fictional character from the TV show MASH.

Those of you who actually watched M*A*S*H*will  recall that Klinger wasn't even a real transvestite, but a man attempting to earn himself a psychiatric discharge:

Klinger first appeared in the episode "Chief Surgeon Who?". In that episode's original script, Corporal Klinger was written as an effeminate gay man. However, the writers subsequently decided that it would be more interesting to have Klinger be heterosexual, but wear dresses in an attempt to gain a Section 8 discharge.

So this fucktard not only doesn't understand that gays openly serving in the military aren't going to be rampaging around like vampires subjecting fellow soldiers to STDs (which he apparently thinks can't possibly be introduced by regular ol' heterosexual sex), but can't even comprehend M*A*S*H*.  This is supremely pathetic.  I mean, for fuck's sake, I understood two things about M*A*S*H* quite easily: a) it's fictional and b) Klinger really wanted out of the war, so he paraded around in dresses.  Either I was a freakishly smart child*, or he's far dumber than a five year-old. 

It seems that with majorities coming around to the notion that gays aren't the epitome of evil, and with DADT on the verge of being dishonorably discharged from the military, the rabid right's frothing even worse than usual.  If we're lucky, they'll give themselves apoplexy over this and leave the rest of us in peace.

*Those tempted to plump for the former should bear in mind the fact that math pretty much defeated me.