Chris Barron, chairman of the board at GOProud, sent over a statement laying into Pawlenty calls for defunding the repeal of DADT.
GOProud is a conservative gay group that's under fire from anti-gay social conservatives because of their sponsorship of CPAC, the conservative conference being held in Washington, DC. Both GOProud and Tim Pawlenty will be at CPAC this weekend.
I understand that Pawlenty is trying hard to get people to pay attention to his campaign. Its certainly a challenge for someone with such little stature in the conservative movement to compete with high profile conservative leaders like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, etc. Unfortunately for Pawlenty, comments like this simply show how totally out-of-touch he is with the issues that rank and file conservatives care about. If he wants to show he is a committed social conservative he would be much better served talking about the need to defund Planned Parenthood, end federal funding for abortion, reign in an out of control judiciary and support for a parents rigths amendment to protect home-schoolers.For background you can read our coverage from yesterday and Joe's post at AMERICAblog Gay. Adam Serwer at the Plumline blog has a post about how no one in the military wants to reinstate DADT. And of course Igor's original post where he asked Pawlenty on his views.