McCain’s straight-line thinking

On Sept. 22, 2001, as a wounded nation ached for emotional leadership, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) delivered one of the most beautiful speeches you’ll ever hear from a politician. It was a eulogy in San Francisco for Mark Bingham, one of the passengers who helped bring down United Airlines Flight 93 on the foul morning of Sept. 11 rather than let terrorists fly the jet into, perhaps, the United States Capitol building. Bingham, a former rugby player who had been a McCain supporter and an active member of the Log Cabin Republicans, was gay.

“I love my country, and I take pride in serving her,” the senator said. “But I cannot say that I love her more or as well as Mark Bingham did, or the other heroes on United Flight 93 who gave their lives to prevent our enemies from inflicting an even greater injury on our country.” He continued: “In the Gospel of John it is written, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Such was the love that Mark and his comrades possessed, as they laid down their lives for others. A love so sublime that only God’s love surpasses it.”

You didn’t need an advanced literature degree to decode the subtext. By couching his remarks around the concepts of love and God and patriotism, McCain was subtly declaring to enemies and allies alike that here in America there isn’t — or at least there shouldn’t be — a second-class status for patriots and heroes who happen to be homosexual. It was a sentiment that reflected a moment in which many conservatives were concluding, in the contemporaneous words of Republican online strategist Patrick Ruffini: “The fact that the Taliban stone homosexuals should only make us more ardent in their defense at home and abroad.”

A lot has changed in the nine years since, both for the country and for McCain. After two debasing political campaigns — first for the presidency in 2008, then to keep his Senate seat in Arizona this year — the “maverick” has made a series of crude reversals in the direction of social conservatism.

The man who once mocked a border wall with Mexico headed off a primary challenge this year on a cringe-worthy campaign to “Build the dang fence.” The devil-may-care contrarian who in 2000 called Jerry Falwell one of the country’s “agents of intolerance,” and who in 2004 described a Falwell-supported proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” was kissing Falwell’s ring by 2006 and pledging support for just such a constitutional ban if the Supreme Court overturned state marriage prohibitions.

So as McCain has become the public face of the opposition to repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, drawing thinly veiled rebukes even from his wife and noisiest daughter, many people began asking, with a perhaps overdue cynicism: Why is he flip-flopping now?

But this time, he’s not.

McCain’s core, almost genetic, principle in governance and life is that the United States should remain the unchallenged military superpower keeping the world safe for democracy and commerce. This belief stems not just from his own famous service in the Navy and Vietnam but from his rear admiral father’s active role as a Cold War theorist and participant, and his rear admiral grandfather’s intellectual development at the side of empire-coveting Teddy Roosevelt.

Any factor, no matter how minor or chimerical, that threatens the assertion of America’s superpower destiny immediately becomes Public Enemy No. 1 for the tempestuous senator. This has led him down some perhaps surprising paths.

Because Vietnam syndrome so nagged at the nation’s and the military’s conscience and its willingness to wage war, McCain became the most influential legislator in putting Vietnam behind us. The ex-POW helped resolve the POW question and restore full diplomatic relations with still-communist Hanoi. Because “cynicism” was steering Americans away from public and military service and from support of U.S. ventures abroad, McCain has gone on periodic crusades against any target that seems to breed the stuff: money in politics, featherbedding in military contracts, even steroids in professional sports.

So we should take the 74-year-old at his word: He’s against repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” simply because he thinks (however wrongly) that allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the armed forces could have a negative impact on military effectiveness. And that’s something no man named John Sidney McCain can tolerate. Mix in the senator’s legendary stubbornness, and I’d put the chances of his converting to senatorial predecessor Barry Goldwater’s famous late-in-life position — “you don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight” — at roughly zero.

The lame-duck Senate, with its soon-to-shrink Democratic caucus of 59 senators, provides the last chance for repeal of the policy in the political short term. McCain is heading up the rump opposition, and he has already expressed preliminary skepticism about a new military study on the issue due out Nov. 30. While some of the no vote is doubtlessly motivated by homophobia (in the literal sense of the word), McCain is nobody’s bigot.

It’s too bad McCain can’t transfer the same expansiveness of spirit he demonstrated at Mark Bingham’s funeral to recognizing that same-sex discrimination hurts rather than helps the military. But we can rest easier in the knowledge that history eventually passes all men by.

Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com) is editor in chief of Reason and the author of “McCain: The Myth of a Maverick” (Palgrave-MacMillan).