Woke? Favoring gays in the military? Not me, says former East County congressman and presidential candidate Duncan Lee Hunter.
The 73-year-old father of former Rep. Duncan Duane Hunter responded Thursday to an anonymous attack online in The American Conservative.
“The neocon boogeyman is not the primary threat to US national interests: a woke military is,” said a “recently departed” career military member who had written senior editor Rod Dreher. “The military has been under attack from feminists (and LGBTQ & BLM & every other social leftist movement) since the days of Bush 41.”
The unnamed veteran continued: “The untold story of dereliction is of ostensibly conservative chairmen (Reps. Duncan Hunter, Sr., Buck McKeon, Mac Thornberry, Sen. McCain & most egregiously, Sen. Jim Inhofe) letting all these awful developments sail past them on annual authorization after authorization decade after decade.”
Asked his reaction, Duncan L. Hunter on Thursday said that in 1993, when “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was signed into law, he wrote the Hunter Amendment.
That amendment — to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994 — sought to require the Defense Department to ask people entering the armed forces if they were a homosexual or bisexual, “and whether the person engages in, or has a propensity to engage in, homosexual acts.”
That effort to bar gay troops lost by a vote of 291-144 on Sept. 28, 1993.
Hunter, who had a 92% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, still opposes LGBT troops in the military.
“The present policy is, in my opinion, damaging to military effectiveness and breaks the military commitment to families who count on the U.S. military to provide a wholesome environment for America’s youth,” he told Times of San Diego via email.
Hunter recalled how, in November 2007, during a CNN-YouTube Republican presidential debate, moderator Anderson Cooper asked a question on behalf of openly gay former Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr.
“I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians,” Kerr wanted asked at the Florida debate.
After Cooper pointed out that Kerr was in the audience, Hunter responded:
General, thanks for your service, but I believe in what Colin Powell said when he said that having openly homosexual people serving in the ranks would be bad for unit cohesion.
The reason for that, even though people point to the Israelis and point to the Brits and point to other people as having homosexuals serve, is that most Americans, most kids who leave that breakfast table and go out and serve in the military and make that corporate decision with their family, most of them are conservatives.
They have conservative values, and they have Judeo-Christian values. To force those people to work in a small tight unit with somebody who is openly homosexual goes against what they believe to be their principles, and it is their principles, is I think a disservice to them. I agree with Colin Powell that it would be bad for unit cohesion.
After the debate, it became known that Kerr was a member of Hillary Clinton’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual Americans For Hillary Steering Committee.
In a letter to Hillary Clinton, Hunter referred to Kerr as a “plant” but said: “Send more!!! Merry Christmas, Duncan Hunter.”
CNN later removed footage of the Kerr question from future telecasts, according to media reports.
Dreher of theamericanconservative.com didn’t respond to a request for comment on Hunter’s pushback to his article, posted Wednesday.
Hunter’s run for the GOP nomination for the White House ended Jan. 19, 2008 — after taking last place in several state primaries or caucuses. He left the House in 2009 — 18 years after entering Congress.
Hunter’s son, also a veteran, succeeded his father in 2009 — and made similar efforts to ban gay service members.
“The United States military is not the YMCA. It’s something special,” Duncan Duane Hunter said on the House floor in December 2010 while trying to slow the repeal of DADT. (He called it “a liberal crusade to create a utopia.”)
Months later, Hunter said in a radio interview: “We can’t see into the future, but the homosexual lobby isn’t simply pressing to have equal status in the military with people that are heterosexual. They would like a military takeover by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community, and that’s what they’re going to keep pushing for until it happens.”
Hunter, the Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran who resigned from Congress in January 2020, introduced a bill nine years earlier to slow the repeal process.
(The amendment would have required all four military service chiefs to certify that repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy wouldn’t impact combat readiness and effectiveness.)
Politico reported at the time that Hunter had 25 GOP co-sponsors, “but that measure went nowhere.”
