I guess it was a pretty big week for the Gay Agenda.  DOMA, which the Washington Post calls "an exquisitely unjust law", was finally ruled one by a Federal Judge in — where else? — Boston.  The decision is only binding in Massachusetts, but the Post says the decision "should serve as catalyst for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act".

Will Obama appeal?  Well, his administration has defended DOMA in federal court before, arguing that "the administration is obligated to defend federal statutes when they are challenged in court and the Justice Department cannot pick and choose which federal laws it will defend based on any one administration’s policy preferences."

Even if they're obligated to defend DOMA, hopefully they'll resist the temptation to compare homosexuality with incest this time around.  We'll see. 

This was also the week the Pentagon sent out a survey to the troops about the impact of the repeal of DADT that included questions like:

If Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and you are assigned to bathroom facilities with an open bay shower that someone you believe to be a gay or lesbian Service member also used, which are you most likely to do?

• Take no action;

• Use the shower at a different time than the Service member I thought to be gay or lesbian;

• Discuss how we expect each other to behave and conduct ourselves;

• Talk to a chaplain, mentor, or leader about how to handle the situation;

• Talk to a leader to see if I had other options;

• Drop the soap;

• Don't know.

I sneaked in one of those options — can you tell which one?  The one with the chaplain, of course.  It's a little fetish of mine.  As for the question itself — I don't think many straight male troops would object to sharing group showers with a couple of hot lesbians.  Just sayin.

But in all seriousness, there are plenty of silly questions that put crazy ideas in people's heads about the big bukkake party the repeal would surely usher in.  Gay groups are warning gay troops not to respond.  I mean, DADT is still in force, after all. 

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network reminds them "there is no guarantee of privacy and DOD has not agreed to provide immunity to service members whose privacy may be inadvertently violated or who inadvertently outs himself or herself."

Wise counsel, I'd say. 

As close as sensible solutions seem, they are always further off than we imagine. 

I was watching a documentary last night called Paragraph 175, about the Nazi persecution of gays.  Before Hitler came to power, during the Weimar Republic, Berlin was the capital of the gay world, but the movement for gay rights was national. Gay rights groups even succeeded in removing Paragraph175, which from 1871 to 1994 criminalized male homosexuality, from the draft of a new German law code in October 1929, at the height of the Weimar's Golden Era. 

Obviously, the draft didn't pass.  The world economy crashed.  And then the Nazis came to power.  You know the rest. 

The gay movement was dead in its tracks, of course.  And after a brief period of disinterest, the Nazis (egged on by the Communists) arrested an estimated 100,000 homosexual men under a beefed-up Paragraph 175.  Half of them were sent to "regular prisons".  As many as 15,000 were sent to concentration camps (there are, according to the USHMM, no known statistics for the number of homosexuals who died in the camps).

Homosexuals at Auschwitz were isolated to "prevent homosexuality from spreading."  They were experimented on in the quest for a "cure".  And those who survived the camps were often re-imprisoned under Paragraph 175 after the war. ("With time spent in concentration camps deducted from their pensions," according to one source. Good news, though: "Time spent in the camps contributed to their continued sentences.")

I'm not saying there are direct parallels with Weimar here, but it's sobering to reflect.  Gays make great scapegoats.  The Ick Factor and all.  Still, as for societal acceptance and legal strides this is a sort of golden age.  But we've actually been here before, in another golden age where a decade of hard-won advances in gay rights — with widespread support — were utterly obliterated in a time of economic crisis, political upheaval, and war. 

Not to piss on anybody's rainbow, but if history is any indication, the process we're going through now is bound to be painful. And with Tea Party crazies now estimated at 30% of the voting public (!), the road ahead is going to be rocky, and could end in a cul-de-sac.

And if it does, better hope you look good in stripes, because you're probably gonna be wearing 'em.