BY WESLEY P. HESTER
Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-4th, is calling on the Department of Defense to reverse a policy exception allowing members of the U.S. Armed Forces to wear their uniforms in a gay pride parades.
“I am calling on the DoD to halt these dangerous exceptions to policy for political purposes. This decision was an outrageous and blatantly political determination issued solely to advance this administration’s social agenda,” Forbes said in a statement.
Forbes called the exception – detailed Thursday in a Pentagon memorandum allowing service members to wear uniforms in a San Diego parade over the weekend – “an assault on the longstanding history of the Department of Defense as a nonpolitical organization.”
Citing a DoD directive stating that service members are prohibited from wearing the uniform “during or in connection with furthering political activities,” Forbes says exception have only been granted in the past for activities such as speeches, interviews and events that “imply Service sanction of the cause.”
To make the point that the parade was political in nature, Forbes references a press release in which an organizer described the event as a “fun, fantastic celebration here in San Diego of the advances in LGBT equality from the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ to the addition of Washington and Maryland to the growing list of states with marriage equality.”
