Politics & Power Quote by Diane Feinstein

Feinstein frames the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as less a cultural concession than a delayed correction to the country's own stated standards. The first move is blunt timing: "The time has come" signals inevitability, a sense that history has already rendered its verdict and Washington is simply catching up. It's calibrated urgency without panic, the tone of a senator translating moral pressure into legislative momentum.

"It is the right thing to do" is intentionally plain, almost spare. Feinstein isn't trying to win a philosophical debate; she's trying to shorten the runway for objections. In a political environment where opponents often argued readiness, cohesion, or "unit discipline", she drags the conversation back to ethics, where the policy looks most indefensible: the government required a performance of silence from gay service members, then punished them for being known.

The genius is in the list: "race, sex, creed, or sexual orientation". By slotting sexual orientation into the familiar civil-rights cadence, she quietly reclassifies the issue from "special interest" to mainstream American fairness. It's a rhetorical act of normalization that also functions as coalition-building, inviting listeners who supported earlier equality fights to see this as the next logical chapter, not a new category of controversy.

Context matters: DADT was a compromise that institutionalized hypocrisy at scale, asking people to risk their lives while erasing their lives. Feinstein's line aims to make that contradiction feel unpatriotic, and to make repeal feel like loyalty to the country's own promise rather than a departure from tradition.