As would-be presidential advisors go, the gay rights movement is nothing if not cheeky.

The Michael Palm Center, a “think tank” in California at UC Santa Barbara that gives academic cover to the campaign to bring open homosexuality to our nation’s armed forces, issued a 29-page memo in May.

The short of it is that they want President Obama to issue an executive order to get around the law passed by Congress in 1993.

They don’t want hearings. They don’t want the issue debated. They especially don’t want generals and admirals to inform weak-kneed congresspersons about why it’s not good to encourage open homosexuality in the barracks or aboard ships. In Self-Inflicted Wound, another Palm report issued in July, they offer this advice to Obama:

“…[I]n terms of their capacity to make trouble, it is the legislative process that would open a can of worms by allowing military leaders to testify at hearings and forge alliances with opponents on the Hill. A swift executive order would eliminate opportunities for them to resist.”

Did you catch that last phrasing? Can’t you just picture Barney Frank dressed as Caesar, telling the military brass and their pro-family allies, “Friends, it is futile to resist!” That would be enough to scare the Al-Qaeda militants back to their caves.

The Palm crew is right to fear public testimony by military leaders. More than 1,050 former generals and admirals, including more than 50 four-stars, have signed a petition urging the retention of the ban on homosexuality.

For his part, Obama promised gay rights militants the moon in his Oct. 11 speech to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), from signing a hate crimes law, enacting a gay jobs bill (ENDA), overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, appointing more openly homosexual federal officials to lifting the military ban on homosexuality. Did he leave out anything?

During the week before the dinner, the White House announced that New Zealand would be treated to an openly gay U.S. ambassador. There is no word yet about how New Zealanders expressed their appreciation. Most of the countryside is populated by sheep when not overrun by cinematic Hobbits and evil Orcs. Yes, we know the good wizard Gandalf was played by sometimes-gay-activist Ian McKellen, who told an interviewer that he takes hotel Bibles and rips out pages dealing with same-sex sin. Perhaps he will put in a personal appearance when the ambassador makes the scene down under.

As for President Obama, he appeared to be warming to the Palm Center’s advice when he declared at the HRC dinner that, “I will end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Not “we,” but “I.” He did not give a timetable. One helpful liberal blogger suggests that Obama might wait until he sees whether his Big Government schemes will cost him a second term, and then do it in the last days. If he’s sitting pretty, surviving political damage from the health care takeover and cap and tax climate bill, he could do it on the first day of his second term without political consequences.

Constitutionally speaking, lifting the ban would take an act of Congress. DADT is already a distortion of Section 654, Title 10 of the U.S. Code -the 1993 Eligibility Law, which says explicitly that anyone with a “propensity” for homosexuality is not eligible. The only legal change in longstanding policy was to remove the induction question, a compromise that friends of the military made to get the bill passed in a Democratic Congress.

Any rash move by the president could deeply affect morale. Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness notes, “If President Obama yields to gay activist pressure and unilaterally suspends or stops enforcement of the law, the troops would perceive that action as an evasion of his oath to ‘faithfully execute’ the laws of the United States.” Continued...