A federal appeals court ordered a halt today to the armed forces’ discharge of openly gay service members, citing the Obama administration’s disavowal of laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had intervened in November to allow the government to continue enforcing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, despite a federal judge’s decision that the law was unconstitutional. Today, however, a three-judge panel of the court lifted the stay, saying, “The circumstances and balance of hardships have changed.”

The court noted that Congress has voted to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” as soon as President Obama and the Pentagon certify that the change will not interfere with military readiness or recruiting. The administration has said most troops should be trained for the new policy change by mid-summer, although it had told the court the law should probably stay in effect for the rest of the year.

The panel also cited Obama’s decision in February to withdraw support from another federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples, and his newly announced view that laws discriminating against gays and lesbians should be declared unconstitutional unless they serve some compelling government need.

So effective today, the military must stop discharging service members under this policy - which was still happening. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is appealing, arguing the decision should be made by Congress. Not thrilled about that, but happy the courts intervened to at least stop people from being discharged under a policy that’s being phased out. 

The fight will never be over as long as religious bigotry exists. The proposed “punishment” includes a plan to:

[P]ush for state-based legislation barring gays from serving in the National Guard and pressuring House members to defund the implementation of the DADT repeal while seeking elected members of Congress to vote to reinstate the law.

As Mat Staver of The Liberty Council (God, do they pick ironic names or what?) explains:

I believe that we can move forward to actually reinstate this law - I think we have enough votes in the House; we probably don’t have enough votes in the Senate obviously, but we need to move forward in 2011 and 2012 to make sure that we do have enough votes so that we can protect our men and women and our national security, put that at highest regard and not the homosexual agenda as this Congress and this President has done.

He’s also promising to mobilize a bunch of faith-based organizations like the Family Resource Council against elected officials who choose not to bend to the will of the religious right.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), once a voice of optimism for repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, reportedly called Saturday “a very sad day” before the Senate voted to lift the military ban.

“I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage,” said the four-term incumbent before the vote, according to ABC News. “Today is a very sad day.”

Back in 2006, the longtime senator communicated a distinctly different view on the issue. “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it,” he said at the time.

What a dick. Seriously. You know what a sad day is? When you can’t get Congress to agree to help out the jobless and desperate with promised unemployment benefits without ridiculous, deficit-increasing “benefits” for the rich, thanks to the party which contains supposed conservatives. That’s a sad day.

The conservative news site The Daily Callerhas removed part of an article that suggested lesbians be allowed into the US military so that their male colleagues can “convert” them.

Critics say the article went as far as to suggest corrective rape for lesbians.

“Lesbians should be allowed to serve, gay men should not,” declared Joe Rehyansky in an article published Monday. Rehyansky, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, is a part-time magistrate in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and a former assistant district attorney.

In the original article, Rehyansky concluded that his lesbians-only policy “would get the distaff part of our homosexual population off our collective ‘Broke Back,’ thus giving straight male GIs a fair shot at converting lesbians and bringing them into the mainstream.”

That alarmed some LGBT activists, who note that much of the article before that comment argued that men are rapists by nature. Rehyansky’s argument that gay men should continue to be banned from the military was based on this notion:

[S]houldn’t the overwhelmingly straight warriors who answer their county’s call be spared the indignity of showering with other men who achieve lascivious enjoyment from the sight of those lithe naked bodies, and who may be tempted to seek more than the view? They are, after all, guys.

In the early evolutionary years of the human species, Rehyansky argued, “It fell to men to swing through the trees and scour the caves in search of as many women as possible to subdue and impregnate — a tough job but someone had to do it.”

There are literally no words to express my anger here. This is just vile. I’ve heard this pseudo-intellectual evolutionary argument in many contexts, but this is the most disgusting. This man is the ultimate privilege denying dude, and unlike the meme, it’s not funny. At all.

Just moments ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the Obama Department of Justice’s request to issue a stay against Judge Virginia Phillips’ ruling that the Department of Defense (DOD) immediately cease all investigations and discharges related to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a law Phillips’ court found unconstitutional one month ago.

Chris Geidner of MetroWeekly is the first to report, “[a] three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued a temporary stay of U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’s order halting all enforcement of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.” In other words, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is in a sense back in effect.

The court wrote, “[t]he order is stayed temporarily in order to provide this court with an opportunity to consider fully the issues presented.”

NO!