Filed under: politically clueless

[struggle4progress]

Pride names grand marshals
Published 04/25/2013
by Seth Hemmelgarn
... Pride's electoral college, which is made up of former grand marshals, has selected Army Private First Class Bradley Manning as its choice for grand marshal ...

http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=68718

S.F.'s Pride Marshal: Bradley Manning
by Neal Broverman
April 26 2013 1:04 PM ET

Bradley Manning, the LGBT Army intelligence specialist in prison for espionage, will be one of the grand marshals of the San Francisco Pride celebration this summer. Manning was accused of releasing more than 750,000 documents of various levels of governmental classification through WikiLeaks, saying he was protesting against "don't ask, don't tell" and American foreign policy ...

http://www.advocate.com/politics/military/2013/04/26/sfs-pride-marshal-bradley-manning

The good folk who organize the SF Pride parade are certainly entitled to run the parade howsoever they choose, and they are not in any way whatsoever obliged to win my approval for any political statements they might choose to make. In like manner, I am not obliged to admire their political savvy, so will remark that this strikes me as singularly stupid

Although his defense council has sometimes argued in the pretrial hearings that, in the military environment, his sexual orientation produced psychological stresses affecting his mental health, Bradley Manning's sexual orientation has nothing to do with the charges against him: there has never been any indication that Manning's disclosures to Wikileaks were motivated by opposition to DADT

For many decades, the US government officially took the view that homosexuality posed a security risk. Although this view had been significantly weakened by the time of Clinton's presidency, so that Clinton was able to replace automatic discharge with the rather weaker DADT policy, it has unfortunately remained an influential view in some circles. Manning's 26 May 2010 arrest for leaking classified documents was plausibly a factor in Congress's failure to repeal DADT through the 2011 NDAA: the House voted to include such repeal in the NDAA on 27 May 2010 (before any chit-chat about Manning's arrest could have become widespread on The Hill), but conservatives in the Senate subsequently organized to block it. It is a testament to the power of the anti-DADT movement that DADT was in fact finally repealed about seven months later, but we should suspect Manning's acts were responsible in part for that delay, in the same way that those acts derailed whistle-blower protections moving through Congress in 2010