In contrast to Santorum the homophobe, Barry Goldwater would've repealed DADT

[alp227]

"You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight." --as quoted in Robert Alan Goldberg's biography of Goldwater (not available in google books but you can find the book at a store or library, according to wikipedia that quote is on page 332.

I can't believe how low the discourse among Republicans today has sunken in contrast to Goldwater's words. And Goldwater won the endorsement of Phyllis Schlafly (who did so via the booklet A Choice, Not An Echo) and got the nomination in 1964! In the years before his death in 1998, Goldwater often criticized the conservative Christian movement...the type of movement that Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum, and even Ron Paul (and Goldwater endorser Schlafly) would march along with. (BTW, here's the losing 1964 Republican platform. In contrast, the successful 1956 platform when Eisenhower won re-election supported labor union rights while the Goldwater platform attacked the National Labor Relations Board and took a sharply libertarian position.) The debates attracted the lowest of people who would boo a soldier simply for being gay and would cheer on Rick Perry enforcing capital punishment and would leave an uninsured man to die rather than grant medical care.