Armed and dangerous (reheated)
GayPatriot has a post up about a response to a column by Elaine Donnelly, the head of the Center for Military Readiness; Donnelly is, of course, defending the ban on gays’ serving in the military.
The column is basically a cut and paste version of things that are already posted on the Center for Military Readiness website. It speaks in airy hypotheticals about the need for unit discipline and cohesion, with no specifics about how gays would fatally interfere with them, except for this passage:
It also respects the normal human desire for sexual modesty. Servicemen and women should not have to expose themselves to persons who might be sexually attracted to them. It would be unfair to force the homosexual agenda on young people whose lives are difficult enough.
Now we’re catering to “normal human desires” in the armed forces? Okay. I have a normal human desire not to have my workplace superiors burst into my bedchamber and inspect my personal effects. But there are things you give up in order to be in the military, and one of them is the boundaries that govern civilian life. That includes the ability to shower in privacy.
You could say, of course, that throwing sexual energy into the mix makes things all primal and combustible and stuff; and that’s plausible in theoretical terms. But “Don’t ask, don’t tell” has been policy for around a decade. It strains credulity to imagine that if allowing gays to serve were going to cause systemic problems in reality, we wouldn’t be seeing them, and the Center for Military Readiness wouldn’t be collecting them to give concrete support to its arguments. Such problems as exist appear to stem less from some sexual-disturbance force field emanating from specific gays than from garden-variety prejudice. (Donnelly also refers to the integration policy “imposed on Britain by a European court,” doubtless giving anti-EU conservative readers shivers; unmentioned is Israel. Check out this 5-year-old article by Joanne Jacobs, too.)
It seems to me that the requirements for unit discipline and cohesion are also rather high in professional team sports, but the latter seem to get by with (I suppose) an informal sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Don’t tell me there are no gays in pro sports.
My best friend during my time in the draftee-era Army was a Navy guy who was one of my roommates at language school at Monterey. He survived 4 years of the Navy despite being both gay and “pee-shy” in public places. I only discovered the latter after we were both out of the military.
Speaking of which: The crappers in my basic training barracks were a six-pack of porcelain stools with no partitions at all where you sat face-to-face and cheek-by-cheek if the place was full, as it often was soon after reveille. Now *that* took some getting used to, no matter what your sexual orientation. Maybe it was part of the effort to make us all more anal-retentive about “policing the area”!
“It would be unfair to force the homosexual agenda on young people whose lives are difficult enough.”
AAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH! I am so sick and tired of hearing about the “homosexual agenda”! What a crock! Like they’re all out there trying to recruit and convert us straight folk…yeah, right.
I went to a Christian cult college for two years, and I’ve heard that kind of stuff from some of the alums with whom I attended. It seems to me that a lot of it is fear and insecurity that is coming from the uninformed and the willfully ignorant.
And, like Joel brought up, professional sports are all about unit discipline and cohesion. Are there really professional athletes out there so naive as to believe that everyone on their team must be straight?
The Human Rights Watch link about discharged gay and lesbian soldiers was disturbing, at best. Oh, how I look forward to the day when stories like the one about Steve May are more the norm, and not the exception.
Ok, so I don’t really have a cohesive point. Just some rants and raves.
“The crappers in my basic training barracks were a six-pack of porcelain stools with no partitions at all where you sat face-to-face and cheek-by-cheek if the place was full, as it often was soon after reveille.”
Wow. That’s just about the least-hot scene I can imagine featuring six military guys with their pants down.
I think you’re both right about the sports analogy, but let’s bear in mind that it has one important limit: the stakes of a game are a lot lower than the stakes in battle. Even so, no, you don’t hear about cohesion breaking down on sports teams, only to have the source eventually pinpointed as the previously-unidentified gay guy, either.
(And, Maria, a good 75% of what you hear in the corner of the Internet within which this blog operates is a rant–no worries at all.)