Congress backtracks on plan to legalize bestiality

Barack Obama

Congress apparently has decided that allowing bestiality in the U.S. military isn't a good idea.

Word comes today from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that a conference committee of members of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate has restored to a planned military budget bill a ban on the practice in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

It had been targeted for repeal by a vote in the U.S. Senate that also repealed a ban on sodomy.

But it wasn't until Les Kinsolving, WND's correspondent at the White House, asked White House press secretary Jay Carney about President Obama's view of bestiality in the military that the controversy erupted.

Carney blew off the question, saying he wasn't going to respond and wanted to get on to something "serious."

How did America get to this point? Find out in "The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom"

Reporters poked fun at Kinsolving, and talk-show entertainers had a field day. But PETA wrote to Obama expressing its concern over the move and contacted WND today to confirm that the defense authorization bill that has come out of a House-Senate conference committee "reinstates the original language of the ban on bestiality in Article 125 of the UCML."

The organization issued the following statement: "PETA is satisfied that the House and Senate have now understood that they were throwing the baby out with the bath water and that bestiality is a serious matter. We are encouraged because, even if this part of the statute is, for all intents and purposes, dormant, the Department of Defense has given its assurance that anyone committing a sexually abusive act with a member of another species will be prosecuted under a separate section of the act."

The question Kinsolving raised concerned an effort in Congress to change laws so that its decision to allow homosexuals who publicly acknowledge their sexual orientation to serve in the military succeeds.

Toward that end, members of the U.S. Senate agreed to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to a report from Alan Colmes on his "Presents Liberaland" website.

The section bans sodomy with same- or opposite-sex partners as well as bestiality.

When Kinsolving raised the question, Carney's response was, "Let's get to something more serious."

The move in Congress regarding sodomy and bestiality comes in the wake of Washington's decision to authorize open homosexuality, which was banned for centuries, in the U.S. military.

The provision never was approved by the House, but would have overturned the section that, according to Colmes, makes it "illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals."

"It states: '(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.… Any person found guilty … shall be punished as a court-martial may direct,'" the website posting stated.

CNSNews.com reported the legislative move got started last month when a U.S. Senate committee voted to approve a defense authorization plan that included the repeal.

The report said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council tied the vote to the repeal of the military's longstanding practice of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," under which homosexuals were not removed from the service if they did not make a public issue of their sexual lifestyle.

"It's all about using the military to advance this administration's radical social agenda," he told CNSNews.com. "Not only did they overturn Don't Ask, Don't Tell, but they had another problem, and that is, under military law sodomy is illegal, just as adultery is illegal, so they had to remove that."

Kinsolving had asked, "The Family Research Council and CNS News both reported a 93-to-7 U.S. Senate vote to approve a defense authorization bill that, quote, 'includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, but also repeals the military ban on sex with animals, or bestiality.' Does the commander in chief approve or disapprove of bestiality in our armed forces?"

Carney said, "I don't have any comment on – I don't have any comment on that. Let me go to another question."

See the questions:

Kinsolving tried to ask whether the president thought it would be endorsed by animal support groups, and Carney said, "Let's get to something more serious."

In the wake of the controversy, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a contender for the GOP nomination for president, called the idea "abhorrent."

It also was revealed that Obama, through an executive order, has brought the issue of sexual orientation into the federal job-hiring process and has created a plan to promote homosexual-friendly policies and actions by other governments around the world.

In a commentary, Kinsolving later wrote, "On the air of my talk-radio program on WCBM Baltimore, which has Internet callers from across the nation – and where I often agree to disagree agreeably with callers – almost all of the callers were grateful that I asked that question of Press Secretary Carney."