Ack! It's Don't Ask Don't Tell.....Again!

Surprise! (not really)

General Peter Pace, good military man that he is, defers to and supports official policy (“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” or DADT) but makes the egregious error of thinking he was speaking to human beings when in reality he was speaking to reporters and also offers an aside on his personal beliefs, that he was raised with the belief ….gasp!....that homosexuality is immoral.

Why if one believes the Christianphobic press machine, this is as outrageous a thing as if he said he actually believed in the 10 Commandments! (If one can be ‘homophobic’ simply by not believing homosexuality is moral, the press can be ‘Christianphobic’ for insisting a Christian belief is ‘bigoted’)

Now that an aged moderate (but pro-defense) Republican has come out calling a Christian belief ‘bigoted’ by reversing his position on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, Captain’s Quarters has chimed in on the topic (where Captain Ed is, alas, un-typically WAY off-base this time). There’s a lot of popping sounds in the comments section drowning out the few comments by people who understand the real issue….and the real issue is this:

Until separate sleeping and hygiene facilities that are provided in every possible field situation can be reasonably guaranteed to be equal to a female’s vis-à-vis heterosexual male and vice versa -- how will (insert name here)’s sense of personal privacy and freedom from harassment be protected? Doesn’t (insert name here) have as much of a right to not be quartered with a homosexual of the same sex as (insert name here) does to not be quartered with a heterosexual of the opposite sex? (And isn’t all this PC gender-speak lovely?)

An Illustrative Tale (all quotes approximate since it has been 25 years)

One of my most interesting off-duty moments while stationed at Keflavik NAS (Iceland) in the early 80’s came while sitting in my quarters watching the weekly AFRTS cable show called “Feedback”. The show was like a weekly Commander’s Call and bulletin board all wrapped up in one. This particular show was the monthly edition with the senior commanders of the Naval and Air Force components of the Icelandic Defense Force taking telephone questions from people on the base.

There was a grand opening (or reopening ) coming up of a dormitory that would house the unaccompanied Senior Enlisted (mostly Navy Chiefs) with the top floor to be dedicated to housing unaccompanied female naval personnel. This was controversial at the time because the Navy housed its people by units, and the new arrangement would move the females out of ‘female-only’ areas of their respective unit living quarters. The female personnel were not at all happy about this change: they did not want to be separated from their units -- so the phone calls became more and more irate as the show went on.

The AF Colonel was barely containing his enjoyment at his counterpart’s difficulty in fielding the tough questions, when the Navy Captain finally blurted out at the last questioner that he really “didn’t see the problem” with or "understand everyone's resistance" to the move and that this new arrangement would help “protect the females from ‘all the predatory’ males”…..when the female caller responded with heartfelt concern:

‘But who is going to protect me from all the females?”

The Colonel and Captain’ jaws dropped and crickets chirped for a while….

Then the Captain responded sheepishly with:

‘um, ah, we like to think that we don’t have that kind of problem …..

And the show wrapped up faster than you can say "DADT".

So all you people who say it won’t be a problem to lower the bar of acceptable behavior and allow homosexuals to openly serve in the military and that it won’t be prejudicial to good order and discipline, I hear:

‘um, ah, we like to think that we won’t have that kind of problem …..

Epilogue:

Navy Chiefs at ‘Kef’ were extremely heavy-handed in many things, and among them were being especially aggressive in gathering females in areas off-limits to junior enlisted without an invitation. A couple of months after the dorm was occupied, ‘someone’ (no doubt a junior enlisted male) pulled the fire alarm of the dorm in question. I was treated to quite a good show from my ‘accompanied’ quarters: all those flashing lights, with Chiefs and ladies milling around in the cold after being made to evacuate their Toga Party on the second floor, but not having enough clothes on to go anywhere else.

Extra Homework: Advanced Reading Topic

Talk about the tyranny of the minority!

Can anyone believe we would still be rehashing this as a ‘civil rights’ issue if NORC hadn’t chickened out and gamed the data summaries to hide the fact that homosexuals make up closer to 1% of the population instead of 3%?

For those who might not remember or be familiar with the study, the normally respected and disciplined NORC tried to pawn off ‘3%’ to the population in their study/book: “Sex in America”, in 1994. They did it by drawing the circle around the definition of homosexuality in an extremely broad context. All it did was piss off those (primarily religious conservatives) who thought it should be less than 1% on the one hand, and pro-homosexual activists that thought it should be 10% or more on the other. I think the end result was that hardly anybody actually read the book or studied the data provided. I highly recommend it. Read it and see for yourself what YOU think the data indicates.

Update 03/25/07 - corrected another fat-fingered typo