In the first hearings addressing the repealing of “Don’t ask; Don’t tell,” Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it was a matter of integrity to let gays and lesbians openly serve in the military. No, it’s a matter of stupidity.
I don’t say this based on the Bible, and a good thing because what does the U.S. military care about that? Neither do I make my case made based on ethics or morals because apart from Scripture what absolute ethics or morals can you have? You only have the dictates of conventional wisdom, the social contract, or mutual self-interest, and these have given us education funded by lottery; parental consent for piercing but not aborting, and the public school system.
Even if the military somehow regard the Bible in general as authoritative, this aspect of the 6th Commandment is the latest in several Second Table Commandments to be made obsolete. First the lure of painless taxes caused the State to accept gambling the 7th Commandment notwithstanding. The fear of feminism or perhaps the supremacy of the individual caused the state to accept the murdering of babies in the womb the 5th Commandment notwithstanding. Now easy divorce, long term fornication, and gay right have made the 6th Commandment meaningless. What case can be made before the world against gays and lesbians openly serving in the military based on a Commandment it views as passé, irrelevant, a historical anarchism?
To a world that still had a moral foundation you could make the case that just as the military cannot allow murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars to openly serve, so they can’t allow homosexuals. But to a world that recognizes no binding authority beyond what all can agree to the case against homosexuality has to be made from what homosexuals themselves say.
Gays and lesbians claim they are naturally attracted to the same sex. It’s not something homosexuals turn off and on any more than heterosexuals do. So we should treat their same sex desires the way opposite sex desires are treated.
In 1979 at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, my unit was made up of males and females. The unit had a perimeter all the way around it to protect it from the “enemy;” within the perimeter was the female’s tent. It was surrounded by three rolls of Concertina barb wire. This wasn’t to protect the women from the “enemy” but from the male soldiers.
The military has generally recognized that there is no denying nature, or in the words of Luther, it does no good to put paper next to fire and command the paper not to burn. So for example, a female soldier may not strip down to her bra though the males may take their undershirts off. A female soldier may not even go without her bra with her undershirt on. Why? You know why. Finally, at a certain age in the quadrennial physicals, all female soldiers will get pelvic exams and all males prostate exams. If the doctor doing the female exams is a male, a female nurse must be in the examining room.
Paper is paper; fire is fire, and you must respect the properties of both. Therefore, if by their own admission homosexuals are naturally attracted to their same sex, then we can’t have them showering or sleeping with their same sex. They have to be housed with the other sex. Lesbian’s don’t need another female in the room for their pelvic exam, but they sure can’t be the one’s doing them, and male soldiers might have to ask for another male soldier to be present for their prostate exams. Then again depending on his “orientation” he might not.
Do you see how impractical this would be? Ah but we’ve grown beyond these gender distinctions placed upon on us by society. There is no more male or female just people. Yet, even the homosexuals would deny this. They aren’t attracted to the opposite sex; they are attracted to the same.
Where will it end? Ask the Romans and the Greeks before them, or the Book of Romans after them.
