Bill Kristol Goes Wobbly on "Don't Ask Don't Tell" or Why Social Conservatives are Not Giving Up on Opposing Homsexuality

I like The Weekly Standard very much and I agree with Bill Kristol on most issues. But this response to the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is the lamest, most servile, most craven, least morally courageous and most strategically inept thing I have ever read from either Kristol or TWS.

Now that the lame duck Democratic Congress has repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), the new Congress will have to see to it that the Obama administration manages the implementation of repeal responsibly, and that the concerns of military leaders and troops are taken seriously. But over the next two years Congress can do something else. It can take an interest in ensuring that discrimination against ROTC on college campuses ends.

Though ROTC was kicked off campuses like Harvard, Yale and Columbia before gays in the military was ever an issue, DADT became the excuse offered by those universities in recent years for continuing to discriminate against ROTC. The excuse is gone.

This is the biggest punch in the gut to fusionism since Mitch Daniels ill-considered remarks about how we need a "truce" on social issues in order to focus on the economy. Kristol makes it sound like an opportunity rather than a resounding defeat for conservatism.

What both Daniels and Kristol well know, but appear to have forgotten, is that the conservative movement consists of an alliance of libertarians, foreign policy hawks, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.

If Kristol, Daniels or anyone else in the conservative movement thinks that embracing homosexuality as normal, instead of resisting it tooth and nail, is the way for the conservative movement to prosper they are badly mistaken. That way lies splintering, loss of influence and progressivist triumph.

Giving up the military to the control of cultural Marxism is to surrender one of the last conservative institutions in America to the Left and it merely solidifies the hegemony of the Left on American culture. When Evangelical and Catholic chaplains start being hounded out of the military for repeating what the Bible teaches, social conservatives will not forget that eight Republicans voted for this fiasco and this disgraceful fact will have consequences as the Tea Party movement considers how to approach the 2012 primaries.