Gays in the military - Jesus, is this conversation really necessary? When I scanned MSNBC's home page this morning why was a story about a highly placed US security official declaring the certainty of a large scale al Qaida attack sometime in the next six months placed below a story about gays in the military? Why? The political arm of the gay mafia [oh, c'mon - that's scurrilous] has done a very good job, an exceptional job of making supposed injustices committed by brutish heterosexuals against enlightened homosexuals the most important civil rights cause - hell, human rights cause of the last fifty years. Kudos to them: I am now considered beneath contempt for entertaining the thought that although the idea of spousal privileges for gay couples makes adequate sense, the notion of gay marriage, that pretends that there is no practical, cultural, historical, sociological or epistemological differences dividing homosexual vows from heterosexual ones, is a logical absurdity. If there's no difference between gay and straight marriages then what you're really saying is that marriage is about love - in which case, why should the gov't be involved at all? But of course the gov't is involved and that's because marriage in its heterosexual manifestation isn't about love but has always been about social stability and the making of babies [making you understand - not adopting or creating in a test tube but a seminal, random, unique and often inexplicable rutting between male and female, full of existential mystery and dread and ignorance and implied but barely noticed burdens, that ends with a fertilized egg].
I'm straying - my point is that it is that very political skill and acumen and zeal that gay rights activists have displayed that worries me as far as gays in the military goes - the military is about winning wars, not promoting limited or marginal political or social agendas - it's about optimal performance in extremely stressful circumstances in order to secure vital and far reaching strategic concerns - if the adept political operatives of the gay rights movement try to impose a largely irrelevant agenda on an organization that is extremely relevant, then that would be a bad thing. What I'm saying is, gays in the military per se? Sort of but don't really have a problem with that. Gay political activism and a representative agenda thereof either operating in or encroaching on the military? Big problem. [example: feminism - women are allowed in the military but kept by and large from combat, from fighting on the front lines - what if feminists were outside military bases protesting this de facto discrimination? The military would be forced to indulge an agenda that had nothing at all to do with its central function and promised nothing that would enhance the effectiveness of combat operations, in fact would most likely have the opposite effect. I think most reasonable people can understand how that would be a bad thing. Now, feminists, for various reasons, some quite obvious, have never taken up this challenge - but would gay activists be likewise inclined should the military piss them off or enact procedures and practices they don't agree with? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that. Sure, it's easy to exaggerate the concern, but that doesn't mean it's not justified - male bonding in combat situations adheres to fairly ritualized norms - I'm pretty sure the word 'faggot' and other inappropriate epithets and actions and insinuations are a regular and popular feature of this ritual - what happens when the now openly gay guy in the company complains, possibly to an outside agency? This is hardly an outrageous scenario - and when the politically correct, who have never even been in a football locker room never mind on a battlefield, involve themselves and suggest soldiers shouldn't be behaving this way? Well, then you got yourself a problem - and for what? To promote the dubious cause of gay rights - a cause which, even if one chooses to view it favourably or as noble, when considered objectively doesn't really need to be fucking with the military in order get what it wants - unless of course what it wants is for homosexuality to be seen as no different from heterosexuality - an existential absurdity as far as I'm concerned - but if the case brings me back to original point: it's the aggressive zeal of gay activists that concerns one].
