With the latest WikiLeaks release comes a renewal of the homophobic argument — led, as it was last time, but Accuracy in Media’s Clliff Kincaid — that because suspected leaker Bradley Manning is gay, gays cannot be trusted to serve in the military.
Kincaid reiterates his argument in his Nov. 29 AIM column, complaining that media coverage “ignored the homosexual orientation and anti-American motivation of” Manning, huffing that “Manning was an open homosexual who flaunted the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy without being punished for his behavior and conduct.” Kincaid went on to cite the pseudonymous coward Jonah Knox as evidence that “rather than repeal the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy, the WikiLeaks scandal demonstrates that the policy and regulations need to be tightened up.”
AIM also gave space to Alan Caruba to claim that Manning is “a sexually confused young man drawn to the Lesbian Bisexual Gay and Transgender movement and yet granted a security status sufficient to have given him access to secret information.”
The boys at AIM were joined by WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah, who wrote:
One of those facing charges is Pfc. Bradley Manning – a young man who should not have been in the Army because he was a homosexual. Yet, he was not only permitted to serve, he was provided access to top national-security secrets, hundreds of thousands of classified documents, which he released to WikiLeaks.org.
This was a kid who, according to the New York Times, was defined by his homosexuality from a young age. His friends in the Army knew he was a homosexual. But nobody asked and nobody told.
They aren’t exactly subtle, are they?
UPDATE: Kincaid piles on in a Dec. 1 AIM column, claiming that because Defense Secretary Robert Gates didn’t “enforce the law” and kick out Manning who had “flaunt[ed] his homosexuality in the military,” Gates had “given Manning the opportunity to spend his time downloading sensitive documents and passing them on to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks.”