After a loooong, drawn out fight.  The Senate  finally cleared the way for final action on removing DADT with a 63-33 vote.  The test vote all but guarantees the legislation will pass the Senate, possibly by day’s end, and reach the president’s desk before the new year.

In the end, six GOP senators broke with their party in favor of repeal. Republicans supporting the bill were Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, George Voinovich of Ohio, and Mark (gay) Kirk of Illinois

Sen. John McCain led the opposition and cemented his place in history as an extreme homophobe blatantly lying, leaving out facts and twisting statistics. Speaking on the Senate floor minutes before the vote, the Arizona Republican finally acknowledged he didn’t have the votes to stop the bill. He blamed elite liberals with no military experience for pushing their social agenda on troops during wartime. “They will do what is asked of them,” McCain said of service members. “But don’t think there won’t be a great cost.”

While this is a victory for the LGBT Community we must remember that the DADT Repeal was supposed to be easy and would have been if our lobbying groups would have done their jobs over the past two years.  We must not allow them to take credit for this victory but must remember that this drawn out and painful procedure was of their making.

We still have a very long hard road ahead of us.  Let’s celebrate and enjoy this but lets not get too comfortable. 

This was the easy one after all and there are a shitload of John McCains out there.