Naval Consolidated Brig (NAVCONBRIG), Miramar, California, where the Gay & Proud are going to wind up.

The New York Times published today a story gloating over the kadavergehorsam, a German term for “corpse-like military obedience,” exemplified yesterday by the Marine Corps, on the day of the termination of DADT by presidential edict, responding to orders by sending Marine recruiters to a Gay community center in Tulsa.

From a libertarian perspective, I must grudgingly admit that William Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was clever and an ideal compromise. If one actually believed (which I do not) that there exists a numerically significant responsible, patriotic homosexual constituency with a hankering to serve in the military, then any homosexual able to behave responsibly and with dignity and self-restraint was free to serve.

The Gay Rights Movement and the left-wing establishment were not content, however, with any compromise, even one achieving the substance of the issue in question. The left is by nature totalitarian, and invariably determined to impose its ideology coercively and completely. Getting the practical result desired is never enough, the left’s victory must be total. Opponents in the culture wars must be defeated and occupied and forcibly converted. It does not matter a bit that no significant numbers of choreographers and interior decorators really desire to share the burdens and sacrifices of military service. The symbolic victory of planting the lavender flag in the most sacred territory of national cultural opponents, ordinary non-urban Americans with traditional moral values and traditional religious faith, who actually do serve in the military, had to be inflicted and enjoyed.

But the left is overlooking the fact that the US military has known this day was coming, and has had months and months to devote to plans and preparations.

What would you do if you were a staff officer assigned to prepare for the end of DADT?

I am quite sure that the US military has issued very detailed and comprehensive special orders and instructions for strict scrutiny of personnel conduct and is now fully prepared to enforce military discipline and maintain good order. When triumphant activists begin using the US military for Gay Pride demonstrations (which some will surely attempt to do), we are quickly going to see the offenders going straight to the brig to experience the full weight and rigor of military discipline. New protocols and procedures are undoubtedly set in place, locked and loaded, you might say, to keep watch for and to prosecute vigorously cases of inappropriate fraternization, favoritism, and sexual harassment. Flamboyant and misbehaving homosexuals will quickly find themselves in military prisons.

We are going to elect a Republican president and Congress in 2012. I would not be in the least surprised if, in the aftermath of the scandals connected with homosexual misbehavior in the armed forces which are surely coming, the next president reverses President Obama’s policy. What one president can do by executive order, the next can undo.