In Washington yesterday, Tea Party Founding Fathers chairman William Temple put on his ridiculous George Washington costume, complete with tricorne hat and pantaloons, and announced that he’s 100% opposed to raising the debt ceiling and he’ll punish any House Republicans who vote for it.

Unless, that is, they do something even more important: force gay troops back into the closet.

Temple said that “if the House Armed Services Committee and the Pentagon slow down on injecting open homosexuality and females into forward combat roles,” tea partiers might be able to put up with their new Republican House voting to ensure American government services paid for with more borrowed cash.

Temple’s line of reasoning:

When the Pentagon’s own studies show that military effeminization may have an extremely costly impact on recruiting and retention, when Islamists have shown their willingness to sexually brutalize American female reporters, why would John Boehner’s House Republicans be caving to political correctness? Why would House Republicans who know better be fostering inappropriate attractions in the intimacy of tents, bunks, barracks, platoons, subs, tanks, convoys, cockpits, latrines, showers, toilets and locker rooms when we are fighting wars in three Muslim nations?

The speakers spent most of their time talking debt limit, but Temple wasn’t the only one to bring up DADT. Rev. C.L. Bryant, a Louisiana tea party chapter founder, former Garland, TX NAACP president and filmmaker, also connected his attacks on Boehner and company to DADT. He said the repeal of the policy banning gays and lesbians from serving openly was “not prudent,” according to military leaders (in fact, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a proponent of ending the policy before it was repealed last year.)

“What is the point of having the stick that we gave you if you’re not going to protect the interests of the American people?” Bryant said. “Also, we send this message to those who have in fact spoken about changing the very nature and the very reason our Army protects this country and the principles that have guided it.”

Fiscal responsibility!