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Thursday, October 13, 2005

Suppose There Were Equality

Sean Barrett over at Harvard reports on efforts of a forty-strong guard from the law faculty to nullify the Solomon Amendment, the much-ballyhooed federal law that forces private schools which receive taxpayer dollars to admit military recruiters to campus. Especially with respect to JAG recruiting at law schools, the issue has come to a head at elite and elitist institutions like Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, and Yale because those schools and their activist student bodies protest the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which forbids soldiers from discussing gay sex with other soldiers.

The fundamental issue clearly has the schools in the wrong: it is a grand American tradition (not to mention amply bulwarked law) that, once you install the Uncle Sam faucet and the green juice starts flowing, he can regulate you to the high heavens. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is the policy, that policy hasn’t been ruled un-Constitutional, and so the government can execute it.

The issue that students and faculty are talking about is discrimination. Don’t ask, don’t tell prohibits gay soldiers from sharing their homosexual exploits with their chums. (Telling.) Heterosexual soldiers, conversely, are free to recount their carnal adventures both homo- and heterosexual with impunity, since they’ve nothing to ‘tell’.

Yes, that is inequality. There happens to be a lot of inequality in the military, but that mitigating factor can be left for another day.

Here is what I am curious about: Suppose the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a pow-wow and decided on a ‘never ask, never tell’ policy that would forbid heterosexual men from making known their heterosexuality and would similarly forbid homosexual men from coming out with their homosexuality. There: equality. Close the book, right?

Wrong. These elite students and faculties would still be suing ‘till they were blue in the face. Their problem is not with a single policy. The ‘discrimination’ argument is a red herring which obscures a broader motive, one which has a grassroots movement unto itself. That movement is to hoist homosexuality upon everyone, and to jam its circle of errant minority into the square of normal majority. The movement will not be satisfied until people eat up without burping the notion that homosexuality is as normal, acceptable, productive, and generally peachy as heterosexuality. Because anything less would be [Cue creaky door SFX] homophobia.

Show me a society that has swallowed that pill and I’ll show you one that doesn’t exist anymore.

In the end, it seems that these Harvardites just want the military to embrace gays. It isn’t about equality in policy or general toleration. It is about elevating a rare and biologically errant behavior to absolute and utter normalcy. Their arguments, then, are fundamentally disingenuous.

Posted on October 13, 2005 07:49 PM. Permalink