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Is Repeal Of DADT Risky For Military?

By: Bob Sordahl (Diary)  |  December 24th, 2010 at 02:37 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

So Congress has repealed President Clinton’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy for our military.  To me, it is more like DKDC (Don’t know, don’t care).  As a Conservative Libertarian, I really couldn’t care less about someone’s sexual orientation.  Having said that, I still don’t want to see a gay couple making kissy face at the local baseball game.  For God’s sake, get a room!

Likewise, I don’t want to see hetero couples sharing saliva in public either.  Thankfully that isn’t usually much of a problem except for the occasional pubescent kids on a first date.  However here in the Pacific Northwest, the blue bastion of Liberal thought, mores and morals, it seems the militant homosexual community delights in public displays of their affection.  Again, get a room!

I really don’t care what people do in the privacy of their own home, but allowing members of the armed forces to serve openly gay, could have more serious consequences than merely making folks uncomfortable at the ball park.

Ignoring for the moment any religious or moral objection to homosexual relationships, is it possible that such unions might adversely affect job performance, particularly in life and death situations?  Professional business managers know that the only way to deal with romantic relationships in the workplace is division and re-assignment.  Hetero relationships are rare in combat environments due to lack of females involved in such action.  With the repeal of DADT, might we not expect to see an increase of same sex relationships in combat or other similarly dangerous military activities?

We know that sometimes judgment becomes clouded in the haze of romance.  Men in particular seem to fall victim to poor decision making while intoxicated by the liquor of love.  It is not hard to imagine faulty decisions jeopardizing the safety of others in a combat team.  Could the defense or protection of a loved one, put other members in a unit at risk?

I don’t have the answers, but I think the questions are worth asking.  Is there more behind DADT than simple discrimination or bigotry?  Most importantly, will its repeal result in decreased effectiveness or increased danger to our armed forces?  One could legitimately ask if those possibilities are worth a policy decision that defers to political correctness.

Originally posted on 12/22/2010 at ConservativeCompass.com

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COMMENTS

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  • bobmontgomery

    ….that’s a real good clue right there. Of course it’s risky. Gates said he’d go along with it but had reservations, et cetera. The law has been passed, but implementation has been left up to the millitary in how and when they do it and when the chiefs and the Pres have “certified” that it won’t disrupt ongoing operations. Which means, the idiot Congress didn’t have a clue what they were doing and were bullied and were pandering and if they were going to leave it up to the military’s own sweet schedulem why didn’t they stay out of it altogether? Because deals were made securing Obama’s legacy in return for the tax deals.
    Less than 24 hours after passage, Richard Cohen in WAPO called for the dismissal of the Marine commandant, who opposed repeal, and called him a bigot. There will be purges. Further, Obama is now “wrestling with his convictions” on GAY MARRIAGE. (That dude doesn’t have any convictions). And now, just a day later, the good Catholic, Joe Biden, says, well, it’s only a matter of time so let’s all just accept that marriage between a man and a woman means diddly.
    It’s not just risky for the military, Bob, it’s risky for America, Western Civilization and the human race. You can not care about what people do in private all you want, but the liberty in your ‘libertarianism’ is in dire jeopardy if you don’t have rules, laws, codes of condut, professional ethics and common sense, not to mention a wee bit of understanding of what made and has maintained this thing called America.

    • acat

      Western civilization, and especially American civilization is based on liberty, and in America especially upon individual liberty.

      You cannot argue, as history will prevent it, that there haven’t been homosexuals in the armed services for pretty much the whole time there have been armed services .. and the Roman armies and English navies seem to have done well.

      If that’s actually where you have a problem, then getting the politicians out of the way and letting the armed services decide what they want to do should actually appeal to you … and yet, you seem to want to reduce individual liberty…

      Please clarify just which side of liberty you want to be on here.

      Mew

      • bobmontgomery

        ….that there haven’t been homosexuals, or even bisexuals, , or Lesbians, or transgendereds, or, if you want to include all the other letters, such as Q,A, I, O, S,P or any of the letters du jour, in anybody’s military. And I surely defend the concept of liberty. However, having served in the military, the term “individual liberty” as pertains to military personnel matters, discipline, codes of conduct, unit cohesion, et cetera, is quite foreign. Granted I served quite some time ago.
        My argument is that the “militant homosexual community” is on a rampage and it’s lust will not be sated with mere non-discrimination. Moreover, those who claim to be libertarian need to look a little farther down the road at just what entity it is that allows them to be ‘at liberty’ in their civilian lives (the US military) and what entities are actively trying to corrupt it (militant homosexual activists), and decide what is in their best interest.
        As far as getting the politicians out of the way, I believe I addressed that when I said there was no reason for them to do what they did except to pander. There was no reason for the Congress to get involved in it in 1993, either, except to But the cat is out of the box now, because “civil rights” trumps everything, doesn’t it? Openly gay? Openly…..Democrat? Openly…..anti-authoritarian? There is no end to it, is there?
        The side of liberty I want to be on, Cat, is the side that has kept the Republic, and your and my ability to believe as we choose, from being taken away from us. And the side that says, if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything. Isn’t it just an ironic coincidence that Richard Cohen (soon to be joined by others) immediately calls for the cashiering of General Amos? And now we have the heart-rendering story unfolding about the Commander-in-Chief being ‘conflicted over his convictions’ on ‘gay marriage’?
        Conflicted over your convictions. Position is ‘evolving’. The argument isn’t over ‘liberty’ at all. The argument is between civilization and chaos.

        • acat

          Nobody is suggesting that the UCMJ be scrapped. Period.

          Nobody is suggesting that if someone of either gender makes unwanted advances, that they can’t be handled appropriately.

          Everyone who goes into the service gives up some liberty to retain liberty for everyone else. I don’t see this decision changing it.

          Those who are, as you ironically call them, ‘militant homosexuals’ will have no interest in serving, and certainly would object to military discipline .. hell, if they had it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

          For someone who wants to serve and is openly gay, this opens a door – just as letting women serve and letting blacks serve did.

          Yes, some imbecile called for the head of the Marines to be gone. So what? As I recall, quite a few have called for the heads of the armed services over the decades over political issues… very few have actually been cashiered.

          As for Obama, he’s a weak man who history will not treat kindly, and who will soon be gone. He can only define marriage for those who choose to accept his definition, eh?

          This is why I’ve suggested in other threads that the best position for the church would actually be to take its’ sacrament back from the government… a government that doesn’t recognize marriage (but does recognize some sort of simplified joint tax form and legal partnership) would be a clever bit of political judo, if you think about it.

          Mew

  • bobmontgomery

    …what is going on here is that you are being too cute by half. I did not claim that anyone is suggesting that the UCMJ be scrapped. You made that up.
    I did not claim that militant homosexual activists want to join the military. You made that up
    You dismiss the import of opinion-editorialization by a columnist of long-standing in a major US publication, the Washington Post. Right, we’ll just pooh-pooh agenda-driven MSM propaganda.
    “For someone who wants to serve …….and is openly gay…..this opens a door.” So it’a all about “opening doors” with you? I suspected as much.
    I am guilty of sloppy thinking? First you dismiss the Washington Post and then in your “move along, nothing to see here” apologia, you dismiss the President of the United States. “He is a weak man who history will not treat kindly and will soon be gone.” Well, Cat, I don’t know if you call it sloppy, but to suggest that the President of the United States can do no harm is carrying naitivity to new heights.
    Finally, your last paragraph is not at all sloppy, for it gives an insight. But again, it is too clever by half. When you say you urge “the church” to take it’s sacrament back from government, what you are really saying is that you want to expunge the Judeo-Christian underlay from the Great American experiment. Most patriots and God-fearing traditionalists don’t care to indulge in “clever bits of political judo.”
    I will not now claim that you expose yourself as a militant homosexual activist and/or an atheist agitator, but you seem doggedly insistent on accusing people of being illogical and sloppy while at the same time pleading with them that there is nothing to worry about. Yes, indeed, Cat, when the leaders of the United State Government profess to be “wrestling with the conflictions of their convictions”, what could possibly go wrong?
    I would offer though that that your admonition for me to confront my illogical, sloppy thinking and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain over there
    has made an impression on me. So much so that I will recall it as I read other posts by you from time to time on these Red State pages.

  • bobmontgomery

    ….I think I confused naivete with nativity. I know…sloppy thinking.

    • jeffreywturner

      If you mean “risky” in the way playing craps with the baby’s milk money is risky, then no, it isn’t risky in that manner.

      However, if by “risky”, you mean that there is a chance it could damage combat efficiency or effectiveness causing increases in defense costs (lives or dollars), then yes.

      I don’t think there is much danger in it causing us to actually lose a war we would have otherwise won, but there is a good chance it will cause added costs. For instance, the JAG office will have to increase manning to deal with more harassment complaints, etc.

      • bobmontgomery

        …..Cohen picks up, it will cost the Marine Corps its commandant, General Amos. He is on record as not being on board with the program. Maybe that’s the price we pay, but as the drumbeat gets louder, I fear that the costs, to use Obama’s phrase, will necessarily skyrocket.

  • renny

    they can also not accept all posing as enlistees, as there has yet been no right issued for serving in the military services.

    • http://Conservativecompass.com Bob Sordahl

      Would a recruiter who rejects an openly gay applicant for ANY reason, be guilty of discrimination? After all, gays are a “protected” class. At least if the recruiter didn’t know their sexual orientation, he could defend himself in FEDERAL COURT!

      • aesthete

        and from what I hear, they do the same thing in the French Foreign Legion.

  • avgjo

    is that (a) so few conservatives seem up in arms about it ,and (b) how few of the arguments are moral.

    I know! I know! We don’t want to scare off the Libertarians or the precious ‘independents’. Still…

    I would never delude myself into thinking I am morally superior to the average person, nor would I claim perfection. Anyone who has read my posts here can attest to the opposite.

    Nevertheless, I am aware that there is a God, and that His blessing is necessary if we are to survive as a nation.

    We can do all the media, social and political maneuvering we want, but if we forget our powerful Friend, we can forget about it.

    I have noticed many on our side likening the conservative awakening of the last two years to the American Revolution. Wrong. The spiritual leadership is not there. I marvel sometimes at how many of our political and intellectual ‘leaders’ are scared of the media, scared of polls, scared to not be accepted in social circle X, scared to offend anybody, and I think of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and I wonder how many of our current leaders would really be ready to sacrifice life, fortune or sacred honor for the cause? Are there really so few? And why? Is it because they are so worried about the court of public opinion that they forget the Higher Court that awaits us all? Is what I read one person wrote true, that we want to enjoy the benefits of a moral society without having to worry about the morals?

    ‘Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime & pure, [and] which denounces against the wicked eternal misery, and [which] insured to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.’

    -Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence.

  • acat

    is how many alleged Conservatives think the government telling the armed services how to operate is a correct use of their political currency.

    This isn’t difficult – the people who want to serve and can accept the discipline of the service (and the rules under the UCMJ) should, if they can meet the physical standards, be allowed to serve. This applies to women, blacks, gays, atheists, whatever. The key being “physically capable” and “accept the discipline”.

    The only reason we have DADT is a bunch of screeching liberals saw an opportunity to make Clinton turn the armed services into a social experiment… prior to that, the government had not meddled in the services much since admitting women, eh?

    My point is, whether you have a moral objection to homosexual behaviour or not (and by your post, I suspect you do…) the better approach to me seems to be to get the government out of the way of the screeching liberals – they’re not going to be the ones serving, after all – and let them go find another target.

    Why waste the energy here when it can be better applied elsewhere, like de-funding Berkeley? (do you realize how much federal money flows into that town, between the university campus, aid to the homeless, etc. etc. ?)

    Mew

  • jeffreywturner

    The reason for preventing gay service-members from sharing their sexual preferences has never had anything to do with the morality of their decisions to engage in or abstain from homosexual acts.

    It has always been about the logistical problem posed by the fact that no one can figure out a way to maintain the objectives that have been accomplished by segregating community sleeping quarters by gender in an environment absent openly gay service-members.

    People in the civilian world often do not understand what it means to have a “roomate” in the military. If you rent an apartment with a roomate, that probably means another person sleeps in another room within your dwelling, and perhaps you share a kitchen and a living room. Whereas in the military, having a roomate probably means you have another person sleeping right next to you, or perhaps above / below you, in the same room.

  • acat

    and I stumbled on this:

    http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/12/interactive-map-showing-where-130.html

    I gotta say, darn nifty!

    Mew

  • David123

    Engaging in homosexual acts is a violation of the UCMJ. So no one in the military is allowed to engage in homosexual acts.

    Now if a person merely tells other soldiers that they would like to engage in homosexual acts but they won’t because it’s against the UCMJ, I would suppose that person hasn’t actually violated the UCMJ. I doubt many soldiers would like to be part of that conversation though.

  • avgjo

    does have the right to tell the armed forces how to operate, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

    I have no problem with homosexuals, atheists, whoever serving. It is the affirmation of their behavior that bothers me.

    As for defunding, etc. no argument. I just think we can do both. And as I mentioned above, the moral issues do matter to the survival of our country. Many of our Founders, men from a wiser time than ours, whose own wisdom far surpasses the majority of our ‘thinkers’ today (if we judge by history), seemed to think so, and that’s good enough for me.

  • acat

    And not by a small margin…. it’s also against UCMJ to cheat on your spouse or {pock} your superior officer. That doesn’t mean much.

    The point, David, is that this is not good ground to fight a political battle on.

    Instead, yank government funding for some of the more liberal bastions that insist, despite never serving and looking down on those who do, that they know best….

    Mew

    p.s. one of the things the repeal of DADT means, in this administration, is that the DoD will have to change the UCMJ to permit open (and, one would assume, active) homosexuals to serve .. or did you miss that point as well?

  • bobmontgomery

    ….You are spot on. Acat has accused me on this page of faulty logic and sloppy thinking. If you examine his posts and replies, he has argued both for and against DADT, both for and against repeal of DADT, both for and against Congressional oversight. He pretends to rail against screeching liberal activists, but apparently is passionate about how well homosexuals have performed in foreign armed forces. Hoorah. He says that Congress shouldn’t tell the military how to operate, but specifically states that whoever is ‘physically capable’ should be allowed to serve, if they can live under the UCMJ, but says below that the UCMJ needs to be altered to be compatible with repeal. Whose logic is faulty? He is either quite conflicted or on a secret mission. See his reply to one of my posts above where he wants the church to butt out of government. When he tells you give up the fight and concentrate on funding, that should tell you something.

  • avgjo

    I think we’d have to go back a ways to find the basis for not allowing sodomy in the military, per military law. If we look at the origins of our government, in terms of both the people who founded it and the ideas and attitudes those folks held, i think that your assertion is at best questionable.

    That’s why I raised the issue of their (the Founding generation) attitudes towards the importance of morality to government and its organs, vs. ours. It is very very difficult to make the argument that laws against various immoral behaviors were made solely on pragmatic grounds.

  • avgjo

    Just for the sake of argument, supposing that a new congress does not feel inclined to change the UCMJ to accomodate ope homosexuals to serve, what do you think the ramifications of that will be?

  • acat

    Repealing DADT without changing the UCMJ would legally set us back to pre-Clinton standards, i.e. any gays in the military have to be well hidden.

    My thought is that the bill that requests the DoD to eliminate DADT also asks them to determine the changes needed to the UCMJ .. but you’re right, the 112th could decline to implement. At that point, my guess would be Obama ruling by executive order.

    But that’s just conjecture.

    Mew

  • acat

    make a number of things that violate UCMJ today federal laws at their time.

    Local laws, yes, but even then there was quite a bit of variety – look up the Oneida Colony for one rather out-there example.

    Deciding this at the federal level is necessary for the armed services – and obviously the armed services must answer to the civilian government.

    Morality, by the way, seems to me to be something that applies to men (and women) not to government. How can something that has no personhood, no soul, no morals, behave in a moral fashion? Government can, however, behave in a fair and just fashion, of course, but that shouldn’t be confused with it having morals.

    Mew

  • avgjo

    I always appreciate your incisive analysis.

    And thanks for giving me food for thought on this issue.

  • jeffreywturner

    DADT is a Clinton-era policy, not a Founding Fathers-era policy.

    The old policy was that gaydom was simply illegal in the military. The time for the moral argument was during the debate over whether to end that policy. DADT does not preclude gays from serving – it only precludes them from proclaiming their sexual preferences while serving.

    Again – you are absolutely correct that acts of homosexuality are immoral. We know this in the same way we know that shacking-up (or “co-habitating” or whatever the PC name for it is now) is immoral, and in the same way that we know stealing, adultery and greed are immoral.

  • aesthete

    for its… elastic interpretation of homosexuality, and always has been. The Army has historically been home to criminals and misfits from all walks of life. The CIA is infamous for its cynical view when it comes to morality. Many of our generals were far from being moral men. When it comes right down to it, morality is not particularly important when it comes to the Armed Forces or our intelligence branches: competence and obeying orders are.

    War, and the professional organizations that attend to it, are not about morality or fair play: our military is there to break stuff and kill people who want to do us harm, whether the persons in question are angels or saints. We didn’t drop the A-bomb in Hiroshima, or firebomb Tokyo, to be moral. We did so to win. The most dangerous mistake that a conservative can make (and that many conservatives have made on the GWOT) is to believe that the US’ foreign policy should be in the service of some ethereal ideal of democracy or freedom for all (and that the Armed Forces should be structured around achieving those goals). It is not so, it has never been so, and it should not be so: altruism on the foreign sphere, while well-intentioned, is both dangerous and untenable. The foreign policy of the US should have one overriding concern, and one alone: the United States and her interests. Repeal of DADT should be evaluated on the strictly utilitarian grounds of whether or not the US is made more secure through this action: adding other concerns is a disservice to the taxpayer and to the military itself, and needlessly sacrifices American lives.

  • aesthete
  • http://908StraightSt.wordpress.com/ mbecker908
  • jeffreywturner

    Does the military teach you a valuable trade that you may use after your service ends? In some careers, yes, certainly.

    Does service in the military give you a sense of personal fulfillment? It certainly can.

    Would some of the homosexual men and women currently serving feel better about themselves if they were allowed to disclose their sexual preferences? Sure, probably so.

    While these may all be valid aspects of the military environment, they are not the PURPOSE the military exists. The purpose of our military is to bring death and destruction to our enemies. That’s it. To kill people and destroy things.

    If we do things that make people feel better about their life choices in the military, that is all well and good, but these things should only be done if they enhance our ability to kill people and destroy things.

  • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

    will remain so

  • avgjo

    It is not necessarily WHO is in fact serving, it is giving affirmation to a group serving. For instance, we may have people who murdered someone and never got caught serving as fine soldiers, but we do not give them affirmation by saying ‘you as a murderer may serve openly as who you are’. If it is revealed that our hypothetical soldier is a murderer, the military would take the appropriate steps to deal with the behavior. Until then, this person may serve even honorably as a soldier. This is what I am talking about with the question of homosexuals in the military. If someone who happens to be homosexual is serving, but his sexual choice is unknown to the military (in an ‘official’ sense), then he serves. If it is made known that this person is a homosexual, then he is out. There is no official sanction of that behavior.

    I have seen it said here several times that ‘gays’ served in Rome, served in Britain, etc. I know that at the Founders’ time, sodomy in Britain was punishable by death. Thomas Jefferson’s ‘liberal’ alternative was castration (Notes on the Virginia Constitution). The Romans had Lex Scantinia at least in the Republic. In both cases, there was no official sanction of such behavior. Now, I know that the British allow it in their military. I can’t argue it’s effect on fighting efficiency, since I am not knowledgeable about the British military enough to say whether they have fought a full-scale war since the open acceptance of homosexuals (I don’t believe they have). I DO know that Britain, since abandoning its Christian roots has now decayed into a shell of itself. Whether it is merely a coincidence or related, I’ll leave to the reader.

  • acat

    Clearly, Bob, you’re not reading for content.

    DADT was stupid – the Dems trying to turn the armed services into a social experiment instead of a force for fighting and winning on the battlefield.

    The UCMJ would need to be changed – and I’m under the impression that part of the repeal of DADT requires the DoD to evaluate what changes are necessary.

    As to homosexuals serving, I’ve got a newsflash for you, Bob. They were serving in Roman times, they were serving in the middle ages, they were serving in 1776, and they’re serving today.

    What I’m trying to get through to you is that the government is making a target of itself by trying to play arbiter of morality rather than its’ designated role of arbiter of justice.

    As for the church butting out of government, Bob, that’s a damned lie. What I said was for the government to butt out of the church’s sacraments. That’s the point of the “wall of separation” that’s so often misquoted – government should not dictate to the church, or any religious organization, who or what their sacraments should affect – but the church as keeper of cultural memory and teacher of morality, has to have an active role in government – one that the church has abdicated for the last 40 or so years.

    Is lying and hitting from behind your normal tactic, Bob?

    Mew

  • bobmontgomery

    …you did NOT say “for the government to butt out of the church’s sacraments”. The quotation is lifted and dropped here; “This is why I

  • acat

    see the wind doesn’t mean it isn’t there .. and just because you don’t understand my position on things doesn’t mean I’m a liberal or inconsistent.

    I’m a small-government libertarian-leaning conservative. Reagan hit it on the head when he said government is the problem. We’ve let the government take over so much that they have no business doing, and let the federal government grow out of control that it’s going to be a very hard trick to get the federal power reduced without another civil war.

    The issue of marriage is simple. It’s a sacrament of the church that the government has co-opted, and we’re rapidly approaching a point where the church has to either assert its’ original right to the term, or has to accept that the government can dictate who can and can’t be married. I’d like to see the church assert itself, but …. that hasn’t happened much in the last 60 or so years… too hung up on tax status, perhaps?

    As for DADT, I think it was an unnecessary intrusion of Congress into the armed services, given that most congresscritters couldn’t lead a squad of hungry marines to a burger king. Its’ repeal puts us back to the proper roles, the DoD determining who’s qualified to serve, and the congress paying the bills.

    The problem appears to be that most religious conservatives don’t want to know what went on in the armed services before they were born. And yet, gays have been serving in the armed services since before we were a country.

    The issue is a distraction, and has a risk of encouraging all kinds of interference with the armed services – social experimentation can come from both sides of the aisle – when we’re in more than one shooting war, and with an army that Clinton downsized quite a bit.

    There are bigger fish to fry.

    As for “de-funding”, take a look at how much in earmarks went into California’s 9th district – the district containing Berkeley – and tell me that pulling the plug on some of the $110,381,745 in earmarks wouldn’t reduce the liberals’ ability to shout as loud as they do.

    I’m hoping you’ll understand that I’m not a liberal, and certainly not your enemy, Bob, but .. you do what you like.

    Mew

  • avgjo

    has been the default since antiquity. When you have to worry about Lex Scantinia or British Law, it is the best for everyone.

  • aesthete

    It is a good policy because it is conducive to the mission of breaking stuff and killing people. That’s why we should keep it. Arguments that we need to keep our military “moral” are not particularly prurient to the discussion: being moral is not the mission of the Armed Services, nor is the military a toy army that we can play with to our heart’s content.

  • avgjo

    My argument, as you know, is that we cannot expect to survive as a country without God’s blessing. We cannot expect God’s blessing if we do not adhere to His law, ‘morals’. If we give official sanction to something He called an ‘abomination’, we are not adhering to His law. This can be the case whether our Courts give sanction to the murder of babies in the womb, or whether our armed forces give sanction to homosexuality. Now, if a body assumes there is no God or that adherence to His law is not essential to the health of a republic, this all means nothing. If one does acknowledge those things, it would be to miss the forest for the trees.

    I only offered my original post to point out that FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, our efforts are doomed if we do not seek God’s blessing and that most of the arguments of even people I like have nothing to do with what is right and wrong in God’s eyes, but are all made from the perspective of ‘how does this effect efficiency with regards to X?’, whether we are talking about the economy or the military. There is hardly any discussion about what is right and wrong. This stands in stark contrast to our Founders. And that’s why, speaking for myself, I believe that their efforts were blessed, and that ours, if we don’t take heed of their focus, could be doomed. (And I’m the guy always posting the ‘buck up’, optimistic stuff.)

  • bobmontgomery

    ….because even those maybe pretty doggone conservative conservatives have been bitten by the “social justice” bug at one time or another, or are able to compartmentalize things. But another thing no one wants to talk about are the unintended consequences. No matter whether there have been homosexuals in armies since the dawn of history, or tax cheats, or anything else, we are now talking about ‘
    the “openly” part. There are now such things as the ACLU,, GLAAD, various LGBTQ etc. groups, and the United States Federal District Court system. As if that weren’t enough, we have the UN, which is trying to insinuate itself into the Bradley Manning case. This thing is not going to stop with non-discrimination, you and I both know that. The Commander-in-Chief is now “wrestling with the conflictions of his convictions” on the homosexual marriage issue. The President and CIC, fifty years old, wrestling with his convictions. His position is evolving The Vice President, showing up at official functions on Ash Wednesday with his dotted forehead, now saying homosexual marriage is inevitable and y’all might as well get used to it. God help us. For those who want to compare this to integration, they only have to look at how the lawyers, racebaiters, scam artists and anarchists took civil rights and perverted it and destroyed the black family.
    Ad infinitum.

  • aesthete

    Otherwise, we as a nation are collectively on the hook for the blasphemy explicitly protected by the 1st Amendment, and all other sins related to the tongue. Allowing open homosexuals to serve is just that: an allowance, not an endorsement. If allowance = endorsement, then you can’t support freedom in any meaningful way: the “freedom to do what’s right”, as some have put it, is both unnecessary and no freedom at all. If you truly believe that God’s blessing on our nation requires abrogation of our freedoms when they allow immorality, then just say so: any country that followed that prescription would look more like medieval Spain than the US at its founding, but there you go. But let’s not pretend that you aren’t being inconsistent if you support bans on homosexuality on religious grounds, but support the 1st Amendment on the grounds of freedom.

  • avgjo

    do you have any ideas on what we can do about it? I am racking my brain…perhaps one of my RedState brethren or sistren can ease my pain and suggest something we can do…

    And yes, God help us. (And Lord, I prithee, please see fit to send us even 1 really really good pastor and revive our land. Amen.)

  • acat

    And it’s a simple one.

    Get. Involved.

    The problem isn’t the pastors. The problem isn’t the congress. The problem is that today’s parishioners, who don’t get involved in their communities because they’re afraid of what the reaction will be….

    As for how to get people involved, I’d take a look at the Dream Center in L.A. and how they pull volunteers in.

    Mew

  • bobmontgomery

    I am not a good strategist, but I have some thoughts. I tend to get too wordy sometimes but:
    I am not a good Christian, but I was always taught that if you are ashamed…you know the rest. I think you are right about getting back to the basics – what the nation was founded on, and if anyone, even on our side of the aisle, wants to tell us to shush, or to avoid the issue, we can’t do that. I don’t want us to eat each other up, but there has to be a reason for us to do what needs to be done, and I think that reason is saving the Republic and the Judeo-Christian underlay that it was based on. And I think there is a whole big chunk of minority communities out there looking for an invitationto join the struggle. Not pandering, just something simple like the truth.
    Practically, I think a whole lot of the executive branch and a whole lot of the judicial branch is going to have to go. Refer to Milton Friedman’s short list of cabinet departments we need to keep. Good enough for me. Also the Bill of Rights contains Ten Amendments. It pains me that when someone on our side cites the Tenth Amendment, people roll their eyes, or worse. If you are ashamed of the Tenth Amendment…….. Anyway, for all this to happen, well, that’s the tough part. You mention a good pastor. Well, also, a good national leader might help. The liberal press is in the process of winnowing out our candidates right now. What are the chances that what we are left to choose from will be one who campaigns on retaining the East Wing and the West Wing but closing down the Executive Office Building? In a nutshell, simplified, of course, that’s what I think needs to be done and that’s what we need in a leader. The Anti-Progressive. And that doesn’t mean anti-innovative.

  • avgjo

    my involvement. I will definitely look at the Dream Center.

    God Bless!