Bryan Fischer contends that the homosexual rights lobby did not do gays such a service after all by eliminating DADT.
The hyperventilating out-of-the-mainstream media has been full of supposed stories of horrific discrimination against homosexuals in the military which they say resulted in many of the best and and brightest getting ash-canned from the military through invidious witch-hunts.
However, the facts tell a much different story. And while facts have never troubled the left, let alone played a significant role in any single part of their worldview, these facts actually should be sobering for our pretty-in-pink wannabe soldiers.
It turns out – get this – that 85% of all homosexuals who got discharged on the basis of the law that prohibits open homosexual service in the armed services threw themselves out of the military.
This little factoid is not the fanciful production of AFA or FRC. It comes straight from the Pentagon itself.
In other words, these gay soldiers didn’t get outed by some snitch. They outed themselves. They went to their commanding officer and said, I’m gay, get me out of here. …
In other words, homosexuals – or people who suddenly discovered latent homosexual tendencies when they could use it to parachute out of the military – signed up for the all-volunteer army, got a few weeks into basic and said, forget this noise. I’m outtahere. All they had to do was admit they were gay – whether they were or not – and they got their walking papers along with an honorable discharge.
And don’t think for a moment that straight soldiers didn’t perjure themselves – claiming they were gay when they weren’t – just to go back home to Momma. ..
Well, all that’s gone now, both for gays and straights willing to tell odious lies about themselves. If a homosexual signs up now, he’s stuck with the whole magilla. Go to your superior officer now and say, hey, I’m a flaming homosexual, I hate the army, let me out of here, the superior officer will say, tough darts, those days are gone. You’re stuck with us now, Nancy-boy.
So, who’s sorry now?
This may be the silver lining in this whole mess. Conservative groups, simply as a public service, may want to sound this message far and wide out of simple, straightforward compassion, just in order to protect potential homosexual soldiers from themselves and from the distressing discovery that they just kissed off a handy exit option that nobody else had.
The more this message resounds, the fewer homosexuals will want to enlist. It’s one thing to be gay, and say, hey, I’ll give it a few weeks and then bail if I don’t like the food, can’t get enough action in the barracks, or thought I’d enjoy ogling male soldiers in the shower more than I did.
Those days are now shortly to be a distant memory for our homosexual friends. They enlist, they’re stuck with the whole program just like everybody else.
In other words, they had preferential treatment and special privileges, a status and privileges and an exit strategy denied to their honest and straight counterparts. And homosexuals just bargained it away. Now, they will discover to their dismay, they’re back to having equal rights instead of special rights.
I think there is more to the upcoming situation to be considered than that.
Military officers in the Pentagon are sitting in offices right now, unhappily drafting regulations intended to make open admission to the armed forces of professed homosexuals compatible with the military’s vital need to protect itself from the kinds of personnel problems associated with sex: sexual harrassment, sexually-motivated abuse of authority, lascivious carriage, exhibitionism, a host of possible offenses will undoubtedly need to be addressed, along with dramatic health hazards associated with the numerous communicable sexual diseases disproportionately present in the homosexual community due to endemic promiscuity. Special steps will need to be taken to protect the military’s blood supply.
Rather than the red-carpet welcome that the left obviously believes gays will be receiving in the aftermath of the lame duck congress’s legislative coup, I predict that homosexuals enlisting next year will find very much the opposite. All enlistees will undoubtedly be subjected henceforward to intense, regular testing for communicable social diseases. And there will soon be a bright line of conduct, and an established program of intense scrutiny of behavior, supervising the lives and interactions of military personnel with unprecedented attention specifically to prevent fraternization and abuse.
Of course, there will also be political favoritism. Some homosexual members of the armed forces will receive special advancement and be placed on display as trophies, proving that the new policy is working.
Our lords and masters of the national elite may have been defeated in the election last November, but they are still our rulers.
Just to drive home the point of who is in charge in this country, the liberal establishment took the lame duck congress it controls and delivered its own special Christmas present to a prized constituency. Now those second-class citizens who fail to attend elite institutions, who live outside the coastal cities and suburbs which call the shots, who bitterly cling to God and guns and are stupid enough to serve in the US military for chump change will have to accept as their equals (and often, undoubtedly, their superiors in rank and command) persons who choose to define themselves on the basis of an inclination to engage in certain kinds of unconventional (intrinsically non-reproductive) sexual activities.
Liberals don’t themselves actually serve in the military anymore. Liberals usually do not even support the military operations in which members of the armed forces risk their lives. Liberals frequently make strong efforts to undermine and delegitimitize the causes for which Americans serving in the military are fighting. Liberals routinely provide aid and comfort to the enemy opposing US forces in the field. Liberals undermine domestic support for our military’s efforts, destroy our national morale, and work tirelessly to bring about our Armed Forces’ failure and withdrawal. Liberals devote their energy to voiding and rendering useless all the American military’s efforts and sacrifices. But the liberals get to tell the American military with whom they will have to shower, beside whom they will have to sleep, who will be serving beside them, and on whom they will have to depend in action.
A certain amount of social friction and the occasional incident of abuse of authority to obtain affection is obviously an insignificant price for the American Armed Forces to pay to permit those wiser and better than themselves to deliver social equality to the oppressed and despised. Besides, along with the burden of providing a new field for the social engineering of a better future for all of mankind comes very possibly a rise to new social acceptability for the American military. Columbia’s President Lee Bollinger is quoted today predicting that, along with transgendered roommates and more interesting activities in the showers, military personnel can look forward to a “new era” in the relationship between American universities and “the uniforms that guard them while they sleep.”
Isn’t that just ducky? They may allow recruiters back on Ivy League campuses, just so long as drag queens can join the Marine Corps.
Is there a place for him in the Marine Corps? He thinks so.
One of the few things Bill Clinton did that I thought reflected favorably on his leadership was the attempted “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” compromise on the issue of persons inclined toward homosexual activity serving in the military.
Clinton’s DADT policy was intelligent and philosophically libertarian. I’m not sure that it was actually necessary, as I do not believe that there exists a significant number of persons of the homosexual-activities-inclined persuasion both eager to enlist in the military and emotionally stable and responsible enough to serve, but in so far as real persons meeting that description may actually exist, President Clinton’s DADT policy satisfied both their military ambitions and the needs of the armed forces for good order and discipline.
The attempt underway by the democrat party leadership of the 111th Congress, a Congress currently enjoying a 13% favorable public approval rating, to ram through a repeal of DADT in a lame duck session has more of the character of a legislative coup d’etat than conventional legislation.
The radical ideologues that found themselves suddenly empowered by a congressional majority resulting from the electorate’s choice of the only alternative in the American two-party system to the incumbent party in response to economic disaster refuse to recognize their repudiation at polls nationally in November and are proceeding to attempt to force through yet more unpopular and extremist legislation in the same high-handed fashion used to enact Obamacare.
The leftwing-controlled House has passed legislation repealing DADT and Harry Reid has expressed the intention of holding in the Senate the same kind of all-night sessions used to enact socialized health care to clear the way, in time of war, to use the American military for an unpopular form of ideological-motivated coercive social engineering.
People who have imperfect vision are not accepted for military aviation. The US military rejects people for being too short, too tall, too fat, and too thin, and even for having flat feet. I don’t know the current policy, but some years ago, persons with too many visible tattoos were not permitted to join the service. Open expression of any form of bizarre behavior, open sexuality, interest in sexual fetishism, confused gender identity, and perversion ought to remain valid grounds for exclusion or separation from the service.
The repeal of DADT will make homosexuals a privileged and protected class within the American Armed Forces. Activists and sexual predators oriented toward young persons of service age will flock to the military to plant their subcultural flag. A cloak of federal protection will descend over flamboyant displays of homosexual identity and desire and the symbolic language of sexual fetishism will take its place beside the traditional emblems of military ranks and organized units. Just as a number of Roman Catholic seminaries, in the period of vocational decline following Vatican 2, were transformed into organs of the Hominterm, there will undoubtedly before long be significant non-combat military units completely taken over by, and operated for the benefit of, perverse sexual activity to the most profound detriment of their legitimate purpose.
The kinds of American families which today send their children to serve in the American Armed Forces will think twice, after incidents featuring the abuse of authority to extort sexual access become commonplace.
The presence in the military of larger numbers of a non-combat-oriented minority privileged by a system of political protection will inevitably lead to more military personnel resembling PFC Bradley Manning working in clerical positions of trust and responsibility, and over time advancing in rank. The homosexual subculture is characteristically leftist and radically hostile to conventional society, the United States, and US Foreign Policy. Members in good standing of that subculture are highly likely, statistically speaking, to oppose the operations the US military is engaged in, and to have sympathies for, and ties, to leftwing activist groups. It is no accident that many of the most prominent British traitors of the WWII and Cold War period, the Cambridge spies, Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean, were all homosexuals.
Republican in Name Only Senators Murkowski, Collins, Snowe, and Brown have pledged to vote to break the filibuster. Let’s hope that responsible conservative Republican leadership is up to the job of stopping this outrageous assault on the American military by an insolent and irresponsible gang of politicians whose opinions and loyalties are representative of only a minority of Americans
More “courageous restraint” reported by Chris Carter at Human Events.
Commanders have ordered a U.S. military unit in Afghanistan to patrol with unloaded weapons, according to a source in Afghanistan.
American soldiers in at least one unit have been ordered to conduct patrols without a round chambered in their weapons, an anonymous source stationed at a forward operating base in Afghanistan said in an interview. The source was unsure where the order originated or how many other units were affected.
When a weapon has a loaded magazine, but the safety is on and no round is chambered, the military refers to this condition as “amber status.†Weapons on “red status†are ready to fire—they have a round in the chamber and the safety is off.
The source stated that he had been stationed at the base for only a month, but the amber weapons order was in place since before he arrived. A NATO spokesman could not confirm the information, stating that levels of force are classified.
What this signifies is very troubling. The policy indicates quite clearly that our government values potentially better relations with the general Afghan population above the safety of American military personnel.
Disarming one’s own troops is a policy expressive of a serious lack of self identification with their interests. No administration made up of men who had actually served in the military would be willing to treat US soldiers as expendable pawns in this way, and no America in which the military was representative of the entire population would put up with such a policy.
John 8:12 Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
Mikey Weinstein, vengeful secularist crusader against expressions of Christianity by the US Military and founder and proprietor of his own advocacy group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, really knows how to write the kinds of press releases the liberal MSM cannot resist.
This time, Mikey, having noticed that the Trijicon gunsight company makes a practice of placing Bible verse references to light and vision as a kind of corporate logo on its hardware, alerted ABC News, informing its shocked and gaping journalists that the use of aftermarker equipment featuring such expressions by the manufacturer is wrong and illegal and unconstitutional, too.
It’s wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws,” said Michael “Mikey” Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group that seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military.
“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.
What Mr. Weinstein is insisting upon is the complete eradication of Christian religious expression, even to the point of banning references and allusions.
Presumably, someone serving in the US Military could not be permitted to wear a Yale t shirt or class ring either, since they would bear the Hebrew Urim and Thummim of Yale’s motto Lux et Veritas, another Biblical light allusion. And the CIA would need to give up its motto, inscribed on the floor of its Langley Headquarters, John 8:32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. The Department of Defense would have to uproot all the crosses in military cemeteries. Every single cultural allusion or reference to Christianity in history or to the Bible or religious expression in literature or music would have to be banned.
In reality, it is Mr. Weinstein, operating on the basis of a vindictive and malevolent hostility to a religious tradition different from his own, who is attempting to manipulate the media into assisting him in bullying public officials into enforcing his own irrational and extremist preferences, amounting to the illegal and unconstitutional suppression of Christian religious expression.
Frankly, there are a lot of Americans out there who think that if Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists out there complain they are being shot by “Jesus rifles,” that’s fine by us.
Ralph Peters goes ballistic over the Pentagon’s report on the Fort Hood massacre.
Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It’s so inept, it doesn’t even rise to cover-up level.
“Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood” never mentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat “the alleged perpetrator,” Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they’re still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack).
The report is so politically correct that its authors don’t even realize the extent of their political correctness — they’re body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.
Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest “American Idol” contestants come in for high praise.
The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the “military medical officer supervisors” in Maj. Hasan’s chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there.
Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn’t stop Hasan’s career in its tracks.
The answer is straightforward: Hasan’s superiors feared — correctly — that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.
Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today’s armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.
This is a military that imposes rules of engagement that protect our enemies and kill our own troops and that court-martials heroic SEALs to appease a terrorist. Ain’t many colonels willing to hammer the Army’s sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist.
I thought myself that existing circumstances in which a fanatic can arm himself and simply proceed to gun down members of a crowd of completely unarmed uniformed military personal in the middle of an Army base in time of war speak volumes about contemporary American pacifism, hoplophobia, and identity problems in certain branches of the US Armed Forces. The US Army actually needed an armed female police officer to come to the rescue of soldiers being attacked by a single adversary.
They call them Armed Forces, don’t they? If US military personnel routinely carried sidearms, and knew how to use them, there wouldn’t be much chance of anyone succeeding in a massacre. An Islamic fanatic might draw a gun and shoot someone, but if everyone else had guns, his shooting spree would come to an abrupt halt very quickly.
Breitbart quotes some news agency’s report indicating that a Taliban commander claims to be holding captured American PFC Bowe Bergdahl and is threatening the American prisoner and using him to make demands.
A militant commander who is holding a U.S. soldier abducted in Afghanistan said Sunday that Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s council is waiting for a response to its demands before deciding the American’s fate.
It was the first news of Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, 23, made public since a Taliban video was released July 18.
Maulvi Sangin, an insurgent commander for eastern Afghanistan, said the Taliban’s governing body was awaiting a response to demands it made to the U.S. for his return.
“The American’s fate is in the hand of (leadership), which is waiting until a response from the Americans to its demands,” Sangin told The Associated Press.
The correct answer to murder or abuse by the enemy of soldiers who fall into their hands is as old as warfare itself. You simply have to do as Colonel John Singleton Mosby did during the American Civil War when George Armstrong Custer proceeded to hang seven of Mosby’s rangers.
A ragged line of Union soldiers stood in a field along Goose Creek in Rectortown, Virginia, on November 6, 1864. They jostled, chatted and joked with each other, pleased to be outdoors on a brisk autumn day. As prisoners of war these 27 Yankees had been confined to a brick store building in the village, waiting to be taken south to a Confederate prison camp. Little did they know that nearly a fourth of them were marked to settle a blood debt — minor characters in a major drama of reckoning between Lieutenant Colonel John Singleton Mosby and Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer.
A few minutes before noon their captors — members of the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry, better known to history as Mosby’s Rangers — led the Federals from the store to a gentle slope above the creek. It was likely Ranger Sgt. Maj. Guy Broadwater who addressed the prisoners. Seven Rangers had been executed by the prisoners’ Union comrades, Broadwater informed the group, and an equal number of them would share a similar fate. The words stunned and silenced the Northerners. A hat with 27 slips of paper, he explained, would be passed along the line, and each man must draw one slip. Seven of the pieces had been marked, and if a Yankee drew one of them, he was to be executed. A Ranger handed the hat to the first soldier.
If this country’s leadership lacks the common sense and the intestinal fortitude to take the well-known, amply precedented steps, firmly established in the customs of war necessary to protect US military personnel unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the enemy, then, the pacifistic left is right, and we ought to try to make war no more.
It is simply wrong to ask American soldiers to expose themselves to capture, and then feel too bound by priggish postures of moral superiority to do what is necessary to protect them.
(PowerPoint needed for this one. Be patient. It’s a big download.)
A classmate passed along to me this PowerPoint slideshow (originally titled: CarreterasAfganistan1) of 58 photos of military operations in Afghanistan. Good 4th of July viewing featuring remarkable photos of US forces operating in spectacular terrain.
I wish I could properly credit these, but the slideshow was evidently one of those virally-distributed emails which arrives anonymously. The file and and some credits offer the clue that it came originally from a Spanish-language source.
The New Scientists calls it a rifle, though it’s really a new grenade launcher. The XM25, developed by Heckler & Koch and Alliant Techsystems, has a range-finder and the ability to determine the range at which the projectile will explode. I bet it’s easier to use, but they used to be able to do the same thing back in the black powder era, simply by cutting fuses to pre-determined lengths. In the old days, of course, they lacked hand-held miniature howitzers, and they had to estimate the range by eye, the hard way.
A rifle capable of firing explosive bullets that can detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings.
The US army has developed the XM25 rifle to give its troops an alternative to calling in artillery fire or air strikes when an enemy has taken cover and can’t be targeted by direct fire. “This is the first leap-ahead technology for troops that we’ve been able to develop and deploy,” says Douglas Tamilio, the army’s project manager for new weapons for soldiers. “This gives them another tool in their kitbag.”
The rifle’s gunsight uses a laser rangefinder to calculate the exact distance to the obstruction. The soldier can then add or subtract up to 3 metres from that distance to enable the bullets to clear the barrier and explode above or beside the target (see diagram).
As the 25-millimetre round is fired, the gunsight sends a radio signal to a chip inside the bullet, telling it the precise distance to the target. A spiral groove inside the barrel makes the bullet rotate as it travels, and as it also contains a magnetic transducer, this rotation through the Earth’s magnetic field generates an alternating current. A patent granted to the bullet’s maker, Alliant Techsystems, reveals that the chip uses fluctuations in this current to count each revolution and, as it knows the distance covered in one spin, it can calculate how far it has travelled.
The rifle would allow a soldier faced with a sniper firing from a window to take a distance measurement to the window, add a metre, fire through the window, and have the round detonate 1 metre inside the room. The same method could be used to fire behind a wall or over a trench. …
“This airburst shell gives the close-combat capability of a grenade launcher, combined with the ability of indirect fire weapons to hit stuff on the other side of the wall,” says John Pike, a defence analyst with Washington DC think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
In the Atlantic, James Fallows recalls an Ethics In America panel discussion on PBS in the 1980s.
First, moderator Charles Ogletree asked a former American officer who had served in Vietnam if he would, in a hypothetical situation in which he could thereby save American lives, if he would forcibly extract the necessary information from a captured prisoner using torture.
The former officer said he would, but other representatives of the US military, including General William Westmoreland, disagreed, and made opposing arguments.
Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening’s panel. … These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings, of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes and CBS.
Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading Jennings and his news crew got permission from the North Kosanese to enter their country and film behind the lines. …
But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit… they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners.
What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to “Roll tape!” as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire?
Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t,” he finally said. “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.”…
Ogletree turned for reaction to Mike Wallace, who immediately replied. “I think some other reporters would have a different reaction,” he said, obviously referring to himself. “They would regard it simply as another story they were there to cover.” A moment later Wallace said, “I am astonished, really.” He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American” (at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship). “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.”
Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot?
“No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”
Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said: “I chickened out.” Jennings said that he had “played the hypothetical very hard.”He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached.
As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, several soldiers in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, who would soon become George Bush’s National Security Advisor, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. “What’s it worth?” he asked Wallace bitterly. “It’s worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon.”
After a brief discussion between Wallace and Scowcroft, Ogletree reminded Wallace of Scowcroft’s basic question. What was it worth for the reporter to stand by, looking? Shouldn’t the reporter have said something ?
Wallace gave a disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I don’t know.” He later mentioned extreme circumstances in which he thought journalists should intervene. But at that moment he seemed to be mugging to the crowd with a “Don’t ask me!”expression, and in fact he drew a big laugh—the first such moment in the discussion. Jennings, however, was all business, and was still concerned about the first answer he had given.
“I wish I had made another decision,” Jennings said, as if asking permission to live the past five minutes over again. “I would like to have made his decision”—that is, Wallace’s decision to keep on filming.
A few minutes later Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform. Jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell said, “I feel utter contempt.”
Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell said, Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces—and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. When that happens, he said, they are “just journalists.” Yet they would expect American soldiers to run out under enemy fire and drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield.
“I’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get . . . a couple of journalists.” The last words dripped disgust.
Not even Ogletree knew what to say. There was dead silence for several seconds. Then a square-jawed man with neat gray hair and aviator glasses spoke up. It was Newt Gingrich, looking a generation younger and trimmer than he would when he became speaker of the House, in 1995. One thing was clear from this exercise, Gingrich said. “The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.”
Shiite Iraqi policemen (and their officers) receive a solid dose of the effective kind of motivational instruction that Western soldiers have been receiving from non-commissioned officers since back when Christ was a corporal. One can picture some Roman centurian delivering the same address at Hadrian’s Wall, also via translator, to his blue-painted Brithonic auxiliaries.
