A Stitch in Haste

So I'm wading through the muck of a very incoherent rant about Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the now-pending Supreme Court review of the Solomon Amendments, by Cardozo Law Professor Marci Hamilton, at the usually excellent FindLaw Writ site.

And I'm enduring paragraph after paragraph of rolling my eyes at the repeated whining about "What's the big deal?" and "offering facilities is like offering coffee and doughnuts" and "law professors are overwhelmingly liberal" and "without JAGs there will be more Abu Ghraibs" and "Why not ban law firms that don't offer flextime?" and sundry other nonsense.

Then I come to this astounding phrase:

Now, law schools might tell you that these [law] firms say they do not discriminate on the basis of gender or race. But so does the federal government's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which is sexual-orientation blind.

Well spank my ass and call me a 1L. And all this time silly ol' me was thinking that DADT was a policy designed to keep gays out of the military (or at the very least in the closet and miserable). I'm glad I have Professor Hamilton to clear that up for me: DADT is actually "sexual-orientation blind"! I guess that means it's designed to keep straights out of the military too! No wonder the military can't meet it's recruitment goals -- only sexually indeterminate virgins need apply.

My intention originally was to comment on Professor Hamilton's constitutional arguments, but there really isn't much to comment on. Only 25% (566 out of 2256 words) is devoted to constitutional analysis; the rest is plain-vanilla conservative anti-gay and anti-academia whining. In any event, what Rumsfeld v. FAIR is going to boil down to is a reconciliation of several conflicting doctrines and cases, including Boy Scouts v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000). Perhaps I'll tackle some actual legal analysis in a future post -- which would put me one step ahead of Professor Hamilton.