Translating the president

Few Americans could understand the words of the Norwegian parliamentarian who stepped forward in Oslo last week to announce that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to President Barack Obama. But we all recognized the name and marveled at the press corps' stunned reaction: They gasped.

We need to do a lot more translating these days. President Obama is a practiced wordsmith. His words are carefully constructed. Not all Americans have yet learned to interpret what those words mean. For example, the fine you will have to pay if you do not sign up for the healthcare plan he's preparing is not a tax. It could be thousands of dollars per family, the IRS will collect it, but it is not a tax. It just looks like one.

Americans needed to be wearing those headphones that are so popular at the UN to receive a translation of the president's speech last Saturday night to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)---first of all, to help us with the name of the group. The Human Rights Campaign is one of the richest and most powerful of homosexual advocacy organizations. There is no human right properly understood that gays and lesbians have not had in this country, but the name "human rights" lends their aggressive agenda a moral patina.

President Obama hailed the "Stonewall protests, when a group of citizens . . . stood up against discrimination to inspire a movement."

The riots in Lower Manhattan in the summer of 1969 did indeed spark the "gay rights" movement. But the transvestites who rioted against police were not the usual sort of civil rights pioneers. They were fighting against a New York law that said men could not dress as women. They were also battling against New York laws against solicitation for prostitution. They were also fighting against the exploitation of the mob-owned Stonewall Bar that was a public health hazard.

For those of us who remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers' brave stand at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala, those screaming, kicking, biting "drag queens" in Manhattan seem pretty far from civil rights pioneers.

The president translates the ban on homosexual conduct in the military as a form of employment discrimination:

"My expectation is that when you look back on these years, you will see a time in which we put a stop to discrimination against gays and lesbians---whether in the office or on the battlefield." (Applause.)

But it's not discrimination. First of all, nobody has a right to serve in our all-volunteer military.

Second, many exemplary Americans are excluded from military service. Consider, for starters, Americans who are color-blind, or who have diabetes. Third, the reason the military exists is to defend all of us, including gays and lesbians. If the military shield should be broken, all our human and civil rights would be in jeopardy.

Since 1775, the U.S. military has prohibited homosexual conduct. The current policy of "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" was a bi-partisan compromise fashioned by President Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress in 1993. Obama said Saturday:

"I will end Don't Ask, Don't Tell. That's my commitment to you." (Applause.)

If President Obama and the liberals in Congress do this, then military recruiters will seek to enlist gays and lesbians by quota. All recruiting for our all-volunteer military is done by quota---so many black, Hispanic, Asian, female, and now, gay and lesbian signups will be needed.

What will that quota be? Although the most reliable numbers put America's gay and lesbian population at less than 4 percent, President Obama's high profile choice for Safe Schools czar, Kevin Jennings, continues to use the discredited figure of 10 percent. His book One Teacher in Ten is premised on Alfred Kinsey's long since exploded claim that one in 10 American men are homosexual.

If you give military recruiters a task, you must give them a numerical goal. President Obama's outrageous selection of Jennings shows he's unwilling to stand up to the most extreme demands of the homosexual movement. Then he moved on to same-sex marriage:

"You will see a time in which we as a nation finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and a woman. (Applause.) . . . I've called on Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. . . .

"And we must all stand together against divisive and deceptive efforts to feed people's lingering fears for political and ideological gain."

In this passage, the president did not exactly say he would abolish marriage as a civil institution in the United States. What he will do is support all efforts to counterfeit marriage and oppose all efforts to support it. It means the end of marriage as an institution. That's because when everyone can marry, no one can marry. There is no longer anything recognizable as marriage.

His obvious contempt for the Defense of Marriage Act---which was passed with strong bi-partisan majorities in 1996 and signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton---shows how truly radical on this issue he is. It passed the House on a vote of 342-67; the Senate approved it 85-14.

Despite his strong liberal majorities in both houses of Congress, there is no measure he has proposed or is likely to propose that could command the kind of support we saw for the Defense of Marriage Act. Liberals and conservatives; Democrats and Republicans; black, Hispanic, Asian, and white members of Congress backed it; even gay and lesbian lawmakers supported the Defense of Marriage Act.

The president calls efforts to support marriage "divisive and deceptive." Defenders of marriage have won 30 statewide contests. Wherever liberal legislators would allow marriage to be voted on, marriage has won. It is no "wedge" issue, as he suggests, it is a bridge issue that brings together Americans of every race, color, and creed.

President Obama may indeed abolish marriage and use the U.S. military for his brand of social engineering, but it's hard to believe that this is the "change" Americans voted for last year.