Not that we didn’t know that the senator from Arizona was a sniveling bigot already, but here is more proof anyway:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading Republican critic of ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, dismissed a new Pentagon report on the issue Thursday and said Congress should not vote to change military personnel policy during a time of war.

“At this time, we should be inherently cautious about making any changes that would affect our military, and what changes we do make should be the product of careful and deliberate consideration,” McCain said Tuesday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

The panel heard from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and the co-authors of the report released Tuesday, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh C. Johnson and Army Gen. Carter F. Ham.

Concerns expressed by troops in the report about ending the ban on gays in the military “do not present an insurmountable barrier” to successfully ending the law, Gates said.

Despite those assurances, McCain said more time is needed to consider whether the military should change the law. The Pentagon studied the issue for 10 months, but “The members of this committee received it 36 hours ago, and my staff and I are still going through it and analyzing it carefully,” McCain said.

It’s been well-documented that every time the Pentagon and the troops come up with a reason to repeal DADT, Mr. McCain comes up with yet another reason to block it. Tomorrow it will be that they shouldn’t do it because it looks like it might rain.

I do have one question for him, though: what is it, Senator McCain, about gays and lesbians that make you hate them so much that you would do everything you can to block the repeal of a law that is clearly discriminatory and basically a mockery of the rights and freedoms that the military is charged with defending? At some point you’re going to run out of excuses, and we’ll be waiting to hear the real reason.

Actually, I think that when you get right down to it, the man really is just your garden-variety homophobe, and all that noise about him being a maverick and going against the grain was just one other way of framing it.