Republican Presidential Candidate Debate: Audience Boos Gay Soldier

According to the Huffington Post, the most controversial moment from Thursday night’s GOP debate came when members of the crowd booed an openly-gay solider for asking whether he would have to hide his sexuality under a Republican administration in the future.

During the Republican presidential candidate debate, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum received a question via Youtube: Stephen Hill, a soldier in Iraq who had to hide his homosexual identity until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” formally ended this past week, inquired as to what the military’s policy on homosexuality would be under Republican control.

Santorum responded by saying that he would reinstate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the federal policy that prohibited LGBT individuals from serving openly in the military: “I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. The fact they are making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to, and removing don’t ask don’t tell. I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military’s job is to do one thing: to defend our country… I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if Rick Santorum was president.”

The real shocker came not in the Republican’s rejection of gays in the military–though Santorum is the only Republican candidate who has formally expressed intention of reinstating the measure–but in the audience’s reaction to Stephen Hill’s question: after Fox cut back from the clip of Hill, several members of the audience were heard, in a shocking demonstration of disrespect for one of our soldiers, booing him.

When asked to respond to the boos, Santorum is reported to have said “ I didn’t hear the boos so I can’t make anything from something I didn’t hear.”

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