Former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn has endorsed Barack Obama, and is taking a senior role on the Obama campaign as a policy adviser.
If Nunn's name sounds familiar, it's because he was instrumental in the effort to preserve the military's anti-gay ban. In 1993, Bill Clinton's half-hearted effort to repeal the military's anti-gay ban was opposed stridently by Nunn.
Nunn, then a senior Democratic Senator, stood up and declared that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service."
That same bigoted, hateful language is now enshrined in the most recent Republican party platform as well.
This news underscores three realities central to the 2008 campaign:
1) Obama has a bad habit of cozying up to anti-gay forces, be they religious bigots like McClurkin and Meeks, or political bigots like Nunn;
2) Gay Democrats who support his candidacy are in fundamental denial of Obama's lack of leadership on gay issues and willingness to pander to homophobia for political power;
3) There's not much difference on gay issues between the leading Democratic and Republican candidacies. In fact, the GOP's language for opposition to equality in military service was provided, verbatim, by the military "brain" in the Obama campaign.
