by
Nick Langewis
On the eve of a weekend event commemorating 12,000 gay and lesbian servicemembers whose military careers have met premature ends due to the vintage 1993 Don't Ask, Don't Tell law, television pundit and book promoter Pat Buchanan says that retired Brigadier Gen. Keith Kerr should have had the "courage" to out himself while he was an active member of the military.
"I don't know if Hillary Rodham Clinton knew this individual was going on to the Republican debate and taking the role he did," says Buchanan of Kerr, accused of being a Clinton campaign plant at Wednesday's CNN/YouTube Republican debate. "There's an element of fraud here."
Kerr, a member of Clinton's LGBT steering committee but not directly involved in the operations of the campaign, asked the following of the candidates attending the debate:
I'm a retired brigadier general with 43 years of service. And I'm a graduate of the Special Forces Officer Course, the Commanding General Staff Course and the Army War College. And I'm an openly gay man.
I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians.
Continues Buchanan: "When the general did not identify himself as a fierce partisan of Hillary Rodham Clinton and presented himself simply as a military man who had served and who was gay, and who obviously did not have the courage, frankly, when he was in the military to come out of the closet and say 'I’m gay,' and to attack the Republicans for lacking the courage to take a position he was unable to take; I think makes him look rather bad."
More on this, and video of Buchanan's Thursday appearance on Fox News, is available at Think Progress.
|
Originally published on Thursday November 29, 2007.