Gays and Mr. McCain

I, too, have been somewhat puzzled by Sen. John McCain stance against DADT. One reader of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog provided what I thought was a pretty good explanation.

He wrote:

John McCain is 74 years old. People who are his age and served in the military have a very different perspective. When they were in the military, being gay would have been viewed as shameful and perverted. Many people that age still think that. Senators, given the bubbles they live in, don’t realize how much things have changed. When McCain was saying that he wanted to “hear what the soldiers had to say” he was certain they would be against repeal – because he would have been uncomfortable serving with gay soldiers.

You can tell by watching McCain that it is simply inconceivable to that 74 year old military man that gays and lesbians would be accepted by soldiers. It just doesn’t compute. He can’t process that information because it is so different from his world view. When he gets a survey that tells him that such acceptance has occurred, he can’t believe it; it must be wrong. Most of the men in the Senate are much closer to McCain’s age than to the age of the average soldier serving today. What we are seeing is what happens when cultural norms change and “the old folks don’t like it.”

Pretty convincing, no? But Sullivan quickly shot this notion out of the sky:

Alas, I don't actually believe that in McCain's case. McCain knows and has worked with and relied upon openly gay people in his own staff. His disgusting posturing on this question now is not, in my view, out of conviction but out of calculation. He got re-elected by veering to the far right and junking much of what he once believed in. He is also clearly consumed with bitterness and hatred of the president who so humiliated him in his disastrous campaign. He is lashing out. And he is contemptible for it.

Alas, Sully is probably right.