by Patrick J. Buchanan
A Democratic Congress, discharged by
the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its
last official acts, imposed its San
Francisco values on the armed forces of
the United States.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be
repealed. Open homosexuals are to be
welcomed with open arms in all branches
of the armed services.
Let us hope this works out better for
the Marine Corps than it did for the
Catholic Church.
Remarkable.
The least respected of American
institutions, Congress, with an approval
rating of 13 percent, is imposing its
cultural and moral values on the most
respected of American institutions, the
U.S. military.
Why are we undertaking this social
experiment with the finest military on
earth? Does justice demand it? Was there
a national clamor for it?
No. It is being imposed from above by
people, few of whom have ever served or
seen combat, but all of whom are aware
of the power of the homosexual rights
lobby. This is a political payoff, at
the expense of our military, to a
militant minority inside the Democratic
Party that is demanding this as the
price of that special interest’s
financial and political support.
Among the soldiers most opposed to
bringing open homosexuals into the ranks
are combat veterans, who warn that this
will create grave problems of unit
cohesion and morale.
One Marine commandant after another
asked Congress to consider the issue
from a single standpoint:
Will the admission of gay men into
barracks at Pendleton and Parris Island
enhance the fighting effectiveness of
the Corps?
Common sense suggests that the opposite
is the almost certain result.
Can anyone believe that mixing
small-town and rural 18-, 19- and
20-year-old Christian kids, aspiring
Marines, in with men sexually attracted
to them is not going to cause hellish
problems?
The Marines have been sacrificed by the
Democratic Party and Barack Obama to the
homosexual lobby, with the collusion of
no fewer than eight Republican senators.
This is a victory in the culture war
for the new morality of the social
revolution of the 1960s and a defeat for
traditional Judeo-Christian values. For
only in secularist ideology is it an
article of faith that all sexual
relations are morally equal and that to
declare homosexual acts immoral is
bigotry.
But while this new morality may be
orthodoxy among our elites in the
academy, media, culture and the arts,
Middle America has never signed on and
still regards homosexuality as an
aberrant lifestyle, both socially and
spiritually ruinous.
To these folks, homosexuality is
associated with a high incidence of
disease, HIV/AIDS, early death, cultural
decadence and civilizational decline.
And no sensitivity training at Camp
Lejeune is going to change that.
Behind these traditionalist beliefs lie
the primary sources of moral authority
for traditionalist America: the Old and
New Testaments, Christian doctrine,
natural law. Thomas Jefferson believed
homosexuality should be treated with the
same severity as rape.
And 31 consecutive defeats for same-sex
marriage in state referenda testifies
that Middle America sees the new
morality as the artificial invention of
pseudo-intellectuals to put a high gloss
on a low lifestyle.
Not until recent decades have many in
America or the West argued that
homosexuality is natural and normal. As
late as 1973, the American Psychiatric
Association listed homosexuality as a
mental disorder.
Today, anyone who agrees with that
original APA assessment is himself or
herself said to be afflicted with a
mental disorder: homophobia.
The world has turned upside down. What
was criminal vice in the
1950s—homosexuality and abortion—is not
only constitutionally protected, but a
mark of social progress.
Yet, just as busing for racial balance
led to violence, white flight and the
ruin of urban schools, this social
experiment is not going to be without
consequences. And it is the military
that will endure those consequences.
Yet, again, if we believe our armed
forces to be the best in the world, why
are we doing this, against the advice of
countless senior officers and NCOs? What
is the motivation other than the payoff
of a campaign debt?
What happens now to Evangelical
Christian and conservative Catholic
chaplains who preach that homosexuality
is a sinful and shameful practice? Will
they be severed from the service as
homophobes?
That cannot be far behind when the
Family Research Council, a respected
organization of religious and social
conservatives that has fought the
homosexual agenda from same-sex marriage
to gay adoptions, has now been declared
by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be
a “hate group.”
The advance of what was once a radical
agenda has accelerated.
In 2004, John Kerry may have lost Ohio
and the presidency because same-sex
marriage was on the ballot in almost a
dozen states, bringing out committed
social conservatives to the polls. Six
years later, the gay rights agenda is
imposed by Congress and Obama on the
82nd and 101st.
Let the reader decide if the direction
America is headed in is toward those
“sunny uplands,” or straight downhill.
