Also at DKos.
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace is entitled to his opinions regarding homosexuality. Whether it’s proper for him to express those opinions publicly is another matter.
In an interview with Chicago Tribune editors and reporters, Pace expressed his support of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military.
He said his views were based on his personal “upbringing,” in which he was taught that certain types of conduct are immoral.
“I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Pace said… “I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.
“As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior,” Pace said.
I have serious problems with equating homosexual behavior and adultery, but even if, for a moment, we accept the two as similar moral behavior, Pace’s statement is charged with a kiloton of hypocrisy. You couldn’t count the number of generals and admirals who have had extramarital affairs on the toes and fingers of Old Mother Hubbard and all of her kids. Many of those affairs involved junior officers. I know of one case where an admiral was playing patty cake with a senior enlisted man’s wife, and the admiral arranged for the enlisted man’s ship to be out at sea whenever he rolled into town to for a roll in the hay. That guy wound up making four stars and commanded a regional unified command.
What’s good for the goose…
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a goofy loophole to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The UCMJ says homosexual activity is a punishable offense. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” essentially said it was okay to be gay and serve in the military as long as you didn’t tell anybody you were gay and didn’t engage in homosexual sex. In other words, “keep your mouth shut, don’t swish, and don’t get caught.”
As a senior officer, I swam through an ocean of administrative nightmares. Some of them involved closeted gays getting outed by homophobes, but that was nothing compared to the fraternization issues between young men and women working closely together in the same command. (And that’s in no way meant as a knock on women serving in the military. I’m just saying that having homosexuals under my command was the least of my headaches involving the sexual behavior of my subordinates.)
Gays have served in militaries since there have been gay people and militaries, which has been a heck of a long time. I heard on MSNBC today that an estimated 65,000 gay persons presently serve in the U.S. military. No matter how we try to legislate homosexuals out of the military, we’ll still have homosexuals in the military. So why bother making laws to prevent something we can’t prevent?
As to the close living quarters situation: if I’m showering in an open bay with 20 other sailors, odds are that one or two of them are gay. Given my choice, I’d as soon know which one or two of them are.
As to gay fraternization problems: we should treat them the same way we treat heterosexual fraternization. (Colonels and generals get away with it, everybody else fries.) And from an administrative point of view, gay fraternizers have a major advantage over heterosexual fraternizers. Gay fraternizers can’t knock one another up.
As for Pace calling homosexuality immoral: heh! Nobody in the Bush administration has any business public making moral judgments about anybody else.
As to whether a military that allows open gays to serve will be effective, well hell, it’s not effective now. The best-trained, best-equipped force in the history is getting its heinie poked in two third-world sinkholes.
The cavalry isn’t getting the job done. Maybe it’s time to call in the Village People.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.
Do you think it is likely at any time in the near future that drill sergeants will find ways to motivate that are not incredibly homophobic?
…and one I can’t answer.
Homophobia is ingrained in the culture.
http://perezhilton.com/upload/2007/03/milking_the_kiddies_ti/GENPace.jpg
Gosh, he’s kind of cute, if you go for older guys;-)
At least since the Sacred Band of Thebes, which defeated the Spartans at the battle of Leuctra…
I’m not sure about that. Pace said that homosexuality is immoral. That is a very ignorant thing to say, because it goes against a principle of modernity: that sexuality and intimate relations on the one hand and religion on the other belong in there own separate and autonomous spheres. I mention religion because there is no way you can make a “moral” argument for why homosexuality is wrong without bringing religion into it. Without religion, morality is simply about people being good to each other, and there is no empirical reason to think that gays cannot be good to each other in the same way that heteros can (on top of that, there is the empirical fact that most gays, men anyway, are “born gay”, so that to try to interfere with their gayness is itself immoral).
Saying that someone has a right to believe that it is immoral to be gay is like saying that someone has a right to believe that the earth is flat. It is saying that people have a right to hold false opinions. This is indeed what the American creed comes down to; we can now see the consequences.
I think we are better off going with the philosophical tradition best represented by Kant, according to which along with the right of individuals to determine their own opinions goes the obligation to perform this determination through sound reasoning, as opposed to simply adopting the prejudices of the community to which you happen to belong.
You assume that everyone is capable of sound reasoning and that everyone’s definition of sound reasoning is the same. I’m sure that in their minds, bigots believe they have perfectly valid reasons to believe what they do.
Yes, bigots believe they have perfectly valid reasons, but as a rule they will not claim that those reasons come from valid reasoning: fundamentalists explicitly say that they reject reason: that’s what constitutes fundamentalism—letting the book “speak for itself”, (allegedly) without engaging in any interpretation. The political counterparts of religious fundamentalists explicitly say that facts don’t matter to them, since they don’t belong to “the reality based community”.
Your remarks are natural for someone coming from the English-speaking tradition. But they also amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the German tradition that I mentioned, the state determines educational programs, and the state is run by educated elites. Thus, everyone’s definition of sound reasoning ends up being the same (the correct one). In the U.S. on the other hand, educational programs are determined on the local level, by ordinary citizens, which leads to the relativistic situation that you mention.
…we can’t control what Pace believes, but he can control what he says, and he doesn’t need to express all of his beliefs.
I wasn’t saying that we should control his beliefs. I said that we shouldn’t grant that he has a right to be ignorant, which is what you did, by saying that he has the right to his opinion.
Great title BTW…
Frankly, it amazes me that anyone even tries to prevent fraternization within the military. You throw a pack of hormone-fueled 18-25 year old kids into isolation (either on a boat somewhere or in a base in a foreign country) and I would be shocked if there wasn’t a whole lot of sex happening. It’s seems sort of like trying to make university dorms sex-free, if you’ve got young men and women together, there’s going to be some sex. Instead of spedning time investigating consentual sex (heterosexual or homosexual), I wish the military would put that energy into investigiating all of the rapes that are being alleged to have occured in Iraq.
As for Pace’s statement, it’s yet another example of the stupidity of the people at the top of the military. Put him right up there with Jerry “my god is bigger than your god” Boykin. Weeding these shitheads out of the military and replacing them with people with a brain is probably a good first step. This type of boneheaded thinking might explain some of the failures of leadership in Iraq.