What can one say about Arizona Senator Jon Kyl's comments following the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"? … Kyl argued the repeal could "cost lives."… "When it comes especially to the small units that do the fighting on the ground . . . [the repeal] could disrupt unit cohesion . . . and cost lives."
Perhaps it's a case of sour grapes. But his comments are quite frankly irresponsible…. Where is the empirical evidence to support his assertion? The onus is on Kyl to back up his statement. If Kyl can't back up his assertion then he ought to keep his mouth shut because not only does Kyl cast aspersions on soldiers who happen to be gay he also demonstrates a lack of confidence in America's fighting forces.
Of course, Kyl isn't the only one who cast the repeal of DADT in such bleak terms. Consider what Family Research Council President Tony Perkins had to say:
Today is a tragic day for our armed forces. The American military exists for only one purpose -- to fight and win wars. Yet it has now been hijacked and turned into a tool for imposing on the country a radical social agenda. This may advance the cause of reshaping social attitudes regarding human sexuality, but it will only do harm to the military's ability to fulfill its mission.
Like Kyl, Perkins doesn't say how permitting gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military would impede it from fulfilling its mission. Regrettably, Perkins is content to blindly assume that all military personnel who happen to be gay are inherently incompetent and incapable of fulfilling their service. The tragedy here isn't allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. The tragedy here is that in Perkins' America there is no need to give the individual an opportunity to prove himself/herself on their own merits. If you are gay or lesbian in Perkins' America you are seen as beneath human and unworthy of inclusion in society. Well, if that viewpoint isn't un-American then I don't know what is….
One cannot indefinitely sustain a public policy that rests on an unstable foundation of an inordinate fear of homosexuality. In the seventeen years that have passed this inordinate fear has slowly but surely abated in the United States. As a result of gays and lesbians gaining greater acceptance in the general population it has become increasingly more difficult to justify the DADT policy….
So now that DADT has been repealed I can state with absolute confidence that the sky will not fall on our armed forces…. If our military can undertake a surge in Iraq they can openly accommodate gays and lesbians amongst their ranks.
Yet perhaps the most insulting aspect of DADT is the underlying assumption that Americans who happen to be gay or lesbian are somehow less patriotic by virtue of their sexual orientation. Our armed forces need all the good men and women they can find. Telling gays and lesbians that their service to this country is unwanted and unwelcome only serves to alienate them from having a stake in our country's success.
Of course, the reality is that our military already has gay and lesbian personnel who have served or are serving with distinction. Do their contributions to our military suddenly and irrevocably become meaningless should they make it known if they are gay or lesbian? If that is the case then do we want a military that places greater value on a person's sexual orientation than either their competence or their character?
The repeal of DADT was long overdue. Now it's time for our military to soldier on.”
The foregoing comes not from the Lambda Defense Fund or the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, but from Aaron Goldstein at Intellectual Conservative, a Web site that used to publish my columns. Goldstein could just as well have been writing a brief for same-sex marriage. Indeed, the phrase “the sky will not fall” was taken verbatim from arguments for same-sex marriage.
“Where is the empirical evidence to support [Kyl’s] assertion? The onus is on Kyl to back up his statement.”
By Goldstein’s standard, no one could ever argue against a radical policy initiative, because the “empirical evidence” that it is terrible will only come when it is too late, long after the policy has been imposed. That’s leftwing sophistry.
“… not only does Kyl cast aspersions on soldiers who happen to be gay he also demonstrates a lack of confidence in America's fighting forces.”
Heck, of course Kyl is casting aspersions on homosexual soldiers, as am I and the 200 million or so other Americans opposed to homosexuals openly serving in uniform are. But that does not “demonstrate a lack of confidence in America's [normal] fighting forces.”
“Of course, the reality is that our military already has gay and lesbian personnel who have served or are serving with distinction. Do their contributions to our military suddenly and irrevocably become meaningless should they make it known if they are gay or lesbian?”
More homosexualist sophistry. If they served with distinction while keeping their sexuality to themselves, why do they suddenly feel a need to share it with the rest of us? And yes, their contributions would suddenly become suspect, were they to make their sexuality known.
Goldstein is using Martin Luther King’s rhetorical shell game. In the most famous speech King delivered, “I Have a Dream,” written by Communist Stanley Levison (who plagiarized part of it from the Rev. Archibald Carey), the most famous line was, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But King was lying for the cameras and microphones. Every other position he ever took was race-based, and involved policies such as strict racial quotas. Indeed, that was what he was fighting for in Memphis, at the time that James Earl Ray assassinated him. King’s “color-blind” civil rights policies and laws were all in the service of black power.
Similarly, the demand by gay insurgents that they be permitted to serve openly in the armed forces is nothing but a move at a homosexual takeover of the military. They will be sexually privileged, just as blacks were racially privileged by the civil rights laws, and will set about preying on their fellow soldiers and destroying yet another bedrock American institution. But don’t expect any honesty from the likes of Aaron Sorkin, er, Goldstein.
And this is what now passes for an “intellectual conservative”?!
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