Pawlenty says he will reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell if elected in 2012

Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, appearing on Bryan Fischer’s radio program on Wednesday to talk up his new book,  said that if he’s elected president, he’ll reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian servicemembers. Fischer works for the American Family Association, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center named a hate group in November for spreading falsehoods about Muslim and LGBT Americans.

Fischer asked Pawlenty at the end of the interview, “We just saw the ban on homosexual service in the military repealed, overturned. Conservatives will be working over the next couple of years to see that that ban is reinstated. If you become president in 2012, will you work to reinstate the prohibition on open homosexual service in the military? Would you sign such a prohibition if it got to your desk?”

Pawlenty said, “Bryan, I have been a public and repeat supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but if you look at how the combat commanders and the combat units feel about it, the results of those kinds of surveys were different than the ones that were mostly reported in the newspaper and that is something I think we need to pay attention to. But I have been a public supporter of maintaining Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and I would support reinstating it as well.”

Pawlenty also spoke out against abortion, noting that he appointed “strict constructionist” judges in Minnesota and that he opposes same-sex marriage.

Fischer is no stranger to controversy; his group is now listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here’s what the SPLC had to say about Fischer:

Fischer claimed in a blog post last May 27 that “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.” (Ironically, the elder Wildmon was widely denounced as an anti-Semite after suggesting that Jews control the media, which the AFA says “shows a genuine hostility towards Christians.”) Fischer has described Hitler as “an active homosexual” who sought out gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” He proposed criminalizing homosexual behavior in another 2010 blog post and has advocated forcing gays into “reparative” therapy. In a 2010 “action alert,” the AFA warned that if homosexuals are allowed to openly serve in the military, “your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals.”

Gays aren’t the AFA’s only enemies. In late 2009, Fischer suggested that all Muslims should be banned from joining the U.S. military. “Islam is a totalitarian political ideology,” Fischer added in August 2010. “It is as racist as the KKK. … Allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different that granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center built in honor of some King Kleagle.” A little later, according to the Huffington Post, Fischer said that whatever the government does to “to make it unthinkable for America’s youth to join a white supremacist group,” it should also do “to make it as unthinkable for a resident of America to embrace Islam.” Around the same time, the Huffington Post said, he blogged that Muslim values are “grossly incompatible with American values,” and therefore no place in America should allow a mosque to be built.

Here’s Pawlenty’s interview with Fischer: