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Lamb Amongst Wolves
December 27, 2010
Turning Paris Island Into Fire
Island
The Real Agenda Behind the Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell”
by Kevin Lamb
fitzgerald griffin foundation
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The forces behind the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) — namely, homosexual activists, the media elite, Obama, leading Democrats, and a few RINOs — have dishonestly portrayed their efforts as a matter of “fairness,” “equality,” and “inclusion.” According to the New York Times, Obama signed the repeal into law before an “enthusiastic crowd.... The audience for the ceremony included a who’s who of gay activists....” The military’s top brass seemed to be Missing-in-Action from this joyous occasion.
Overturning the Clinton-era law, which prohibited lesbians and gay men to flaunt their lifestyles as uniformed members of the U.S. military, isn’t about allowing individual gay servicemen and women to serve honorably as valued airman, sailors, soldiers, or Marines. What the repeal of DADT really comes down to is power and influence — the never-ending recognition and affirmation of homosexuality as a publicly sanctioned alternative “lifestyle” — and the political establishment’s action to reward an important constituency of liberal activists.
It is the latest attempt to normalize behavior that society has historically considered destructive, hedonistic, decadent, and debauched. It is about extending group rights and privileges, societal recognition, and acceptance to a previously shunned subculture.
Author and philosopher Michael Levin has astutely identified the crux of what really lies behind activist agenda:
It is commonly asserted that legislation granting homosexuals the privilege or right to be firemen endorses not homosexuality, but an expanded conception of human liberation.... A society that grants privileges to homosexuals while recognizing that, in the light of generally known history, this act can be interpreted as a positive re-evaluation of homosexuality, is signaling that it now thinks homosexuality is all right.... Many commentators in the popular press have observed that homosexuals, unlike members of racial minorities, can always “stay in the closet” when applying for jobs. What homosexual rights activists really want, therefore, is not access to jobs but legitimation of their homosexuality.
This is precisely the political dynamic involved in repealing DADT. It is about power, leverage, and clout, and the extension of privileges, recognition, and re-evaluation to a once marginalized subculture that, until now, has been openly disqualified for military service. It is the classic case of the camel getting its nose under the pup tent.
Supporters of the repeal of DADT frequently argue that purging the armed forces of homosexuals hurts the operational effectiveness of the military, since many homosexual servicemen and women are highly skilled professionals. Hence, not allowing homosexuals to openly serve as homosexuals drains the military of much-needed talent. The argument is disingenuous because ultimately it isn’t about what benefits the military. Essentially it comes down to what is beneficial to the homosexual agenda (dismantling prohibitive policies and gaining public acceptance): Today the armed services, tomorrow marriage. It is an attempt by activists to keep homosexuality before the public until this subculture is fully integrated into all spheres of American society.
In voting to repeal DADT, Sen. Richard M. Burr (R-NC) stated that repeal was “generationally right” and argued that Americans “don’t think exclusion is the right thing for the United States to do.” However, exclusion — maintaining high standards for selecting qualified applicants — is what has historically made the U.S. armed forces an effective and efficient fighting force. Stripping away the military’s exclusionary character, lowering standards for politically correct social experimentation, will eventually erode its combat effectiveness.
The U.S. military has largely been exempt from “societal pressures” of egalitarian conformity. A good example of this is how the military is, by law, exempt from discrimination lawsuits under the Civil Rights Act. Acceptance into military service has never been viewed as a “civil right.”
Every year thousands of applicants are rejected from serving in the military because these prospects do not pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a multi-aptitude test. Scores in four critical areas (arithmetic reasoning, word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, and mathematics knowledge) comprise an applicant’s Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) score. Passing the baseline AFQT score determines whether or not applicants are qualified to enlist in the U.S. military. (A recent report by the Education Trust found that 23 percent of high school graduates fail to meet the minimum threshold on the enlistment test to join any branch of the U.S. military.)
The ASVAB is discriminatory in the sense that it weeds out unqualified applicants; the results often have “disparate impact,” in other words, the disqualified applicant pool has a greater impact among ethnic and racial minorities. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that the use of an IQ test for employment selection is discriminatory under Title VII of Civil Rights Act because of the test’s “disparate impact” on racial minorities.
The point is that the cohesiveness and operational effectiveness of the U.S. military and the military’s primary mission of national defense depend upon preserving this exclusionary factor in recruit selection. The United States Armed Forces should remain isolated from egalitarian coercion — external pressure to conform and shape our military to fit contemporary fads and fashions.
Lifting DADT is indicative of what author John Kekes describes as the “Rhetoric of Toleration” in his book, The Illusions of Egalitarianism:
The truth is that egalitarian liberals advocate toleration of discrimination in favor of minorities and women (but not against them); of obscenity that offends religious believers and patriots (but not blacks and Jews); of unions’ spending large sums in support of political causes (but not corporations’ doing the same); of pot smoking (but not cigarette smoking); of abortion (but not capital punishment); of the public lies of Clinton (but not of Nixon); of hate speech against fundamentalists (but not homosexuals); of sex education in elementary schools (but not prayer); of jobs open only to union members (but not private clubs open only to males); of lies about American imperialism (but not the Holocaust); of sacrilegious language (but not of language that uses he to refer to all human beings); of scientific research into just about anything (except racial differences in intelligence); and so on and on.... [E]galitarian liberals are unique in favoring limits on what they dislike while claiming to champion toleration.
Repealing DADT is simply the removal of one more exclusionary barrier that egalitarians find contemptible. In the not-too-distant future, given the repeal of DADT, one can easily foresee “Gay Enlisted Clubs” and “Gay Officer Clubs” or the “Gay Leatherneck Association” or the Marine Corps branch of the Mattachine Society as the extension of this privileged group reaches new zeniths within the ranks of the U.S. military.
Is it really worth jeopardizing the cohesiveness and combat effectiveness of an overwhelmingly macho institution such as the USMC for the sake of accommodating the agenda of the Stonewall Brigade?
Lamb Amongst Wolves column by Kevin Lamb is copyright © 2010 by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, www.fgfbooks.com.
All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reprint if credit is given to the author and the Foundation.Kevin Lamb, a columnist and writer, served as managing editor of Human Events from 2002-2005.
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