The extremes to which President Barack Obama went to dismantle the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on homosexuals in the military were revealed recently with the recollections by one of the leaders at a 2010 Oval Office meeting between Obama and the heads of all five military service branches.
According to a report from BuzzFeed.com, Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Robert Papp revealed that the five commanders were called to the 2010 White House meeting, where “President Obama looked all five service chiefs in the eye and said, ‘This is what I want to do,’” apparently outlining his scheme to do away with the over 200-year prohibition of homosexuals serving in America’s military ranks.
Papp’s revelation came during a question-and-answer session with cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy following a leadership address the admiral delivered on January 8. In his comments Papp said that he could not divulge all that Obama said during the meeting — “that’s private communications within the Oval Office.” He did emphasize, however, that “if we didn’t agree with it — if any of us didn’t agree with it — we all had the opportunity to resign our commissions and go do other things.”
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Asked how officers should respond to official policies with which they may personally disagree, Papp told the cadets that if he disagreed on moral grounds with a top-down edict, “it’s my obligation to voice that, regardless of the risk it might give my career.” He added that “I’ve been in those situations. I’ve been fortunate to have good leaders that have appreciated that.”
Apparently arguing for the leadership path of least resistance, Papp said that it was okay for a leader to “not be thrilled” with a particular policy (such as, assumedly, homosexuals in the military), but if they didn’t “see anything terribly wrong with it,” they had a duty to support and enforce the policy.
BuzzFeed noted that Papp, who retired from active military service at the end of March, “added that he thought the U.S. military made the right decision by abolishing DADT.”
In a 2008 interview with the homosexual publication The Advocate, then U.S. Senator Obama assured that he would never make a military leader’s position on DADT a “litmus test” for serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Obviously, there are so many issues that a member of the Joint Chiefs has to deal with,” said Obama, “and my paramount obligation is to get the best possible people to keep America safe.”
Retired Army Major General Patrick Brady, a Medal of Honor recipient, told WorldNetDaily that Obama’s aggressive agenda is injuring the morale of military personnel to a degree that is seriously compromising national security. “There is no doubt [Obama] is intent on emasculating the military and will fire anyone who disagrees with him [over issues like] homosexuals, women in foxholes, the Obama sequester,” said Brady.
Retired Army Lieutenant General William Boykin, a founding member of the Army’s Delta Force and a deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence during George W. Bush’s administration, told WorldNetDaily that he and other military leaders are alarmed over the number of generals who have been “retired” during Obama’s watch. “Over the past three years, it is unprecedented for the number of four-star generals to be relieved of duty, and not necessarily relieved for cause,” he said. “I believe there is a purging of the military. The problem is worse than we have ever seen.”
In a related story, the Washington Times reported in March that, according to a Pentagon survey, the victims of sexual assault in the military are predominantly male, a revelation that highlights the troubling trend of male-on-male sexual assaults among military personnel that has come since the official end of DADT in 2011.
“When the Defense Department released the results of its anonymous sexual abuse survey this month and concluded that 26,000 service members were victims in fiscal 2012, which ended Sept. 30, an automatic assumption was that most were women,” reported the Times. “But roughly 14,000 of the victims were male and 12,000 female, according to a scientific survey sample produced by the Pentagon.”
Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, which has been a vocal opponent of allowing homosexuals to serve in the military, said: “It appears that the DOD has serious problems with male-on-male sexual assaults that men are not reporting and the Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about.”
