Religious Right Leader Says Gays in Military Bring Nazism

It appears Congress is on the verge of repealing the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy for gays in the military. But that, according to the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer, would be a mistake of epic proportions: It could produce gay, goose-stepping Nazis in America.

Fischer, the religious-right group’s director of issue analysis for government and public policy, claimed last week that Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers were, in fact, a sinister gay fighting force. Only homosexuals were sufficiently vicious to carry out Hitler’s most brutal orders without question, Fischer argues. Heterosexual soldiers just weren’t up to the gruesome task.

Fischer gave this history lesson on his radio program last month and followed it up with a May 27 blog post on the AFA website. For Fischer, the lesson from history is clear: Repealing DADT will open the door to horrific atrocities.

“The bottom line from what follows is this: Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews,” Fischer wrote. “Gays in the military is an experiment that has been tried and found disastrously and tragically wanting. Maybe it’s time for Congress to learn a lesson from history.”

Actually, the vast majority of historians reject the claim that Hitler was gay. Virtually all serious historians of the period reject the allegation that homosexuality was an important part of the German Nazi Party. In fact, after the Nazis came to power in 1933, homosexuals were persecuted (and many inside the Nazi Party were murdered), and ultimately some 100,000 were arrested. Many of those were sent to concentration camps, where an unknown number died.

Among his sources, Fischer cites The Pink Swastika, an unhinged and defamatory history that makes the entirely false claim that gays helped orchestrate the Holocaust. He cites the book to wipe away what is for him a serious historical problem — the very real Nazi persecution of homosexuals. “[T]he homosexuals the Nazis persecuted were almost exclusively the effeminate members of the gay community in Germany, and … much of the mistreatment was administered by masculine homosexuals who despised effeminacy in all its forms,” Fischer wrote.

Fischer isn’t the only one warning that repeal of the military’s ban on open homosexuality could create a gay Fourth Reich. Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid made a similar point in a column published on that far-right group’s website in February. “Indeed, a homosexualized military could itself become a threat, just like it was in the Nazi period,” Kincaid wrote.

That passage included a convenient link to a column titled, “The Nazi Model for ‘Gays’ in U.S. Military” by Pink Swastika co-author Scott Lively.

If Bryan Fischer isn’t the first to warn of the gay Nazi menace that could be unleashed, it’s understandable. He’s been busy. So far this year he’s suggested the death penalty for the sexually promiscuous and proposed that people in same-sex relationships face the same legal penalties as heroin users.