Posted on 10/22/2009 12:15:57 PM PDT by Drew68
Navy officials handed a career-ending letter of censure yesterday to the chief who oversaw the prolonged hazing and sexual taunting of members of a Navy dog-handling unit in Bahrain.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Michael Toussaint was removed from supervisory duties overseas with the Naval Special Warfare Command and will work in an administrative post at a base in Norfolk, Va., until his forced retirement in January, said Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a Navy spokeswoman.
Toussaint is on leave and has refused all interview requests, said Cmdr. Greg Geisen, a spokesman for the Coronado-based Naval Special Warfare Command.
The Navy began investigating allegations of hazing in the 19-member dog-handling unit in late 2006, when a female sailor new to the team complained. The investigators issued their report the next year and substantiated 93 incidents of abuse or misconduct between 2004 and 2006, when Toussaint commanded the unit.
Toussaint received minimal punishment and later was promoted to senior chief.
The incidents included pervasive sexual and racial harassment, theft of clothes while sailors showered and hiring prostitutes for the unit's parties. Sailors also were forced to eat liver dog snacks or carry canine chew toys in their mouths.
The hazing gained national attention in recent weeks when Joseph Rocha, a University of San Diego junior who served in the unit and is a gay-rights activist, gave a series of newspaper and television interviews about his experiences.
Rocha said the abuse he suffered during 28 months in the unit took on strong homosexual overtones after he refused to frequent prostitutes or take part in raunchy heterosexual banter.
On one occasion, Rocha said, he was duct-taped to a chair and locked in a dog kennel. Another time, he was forced to simulate sex with a man as part of a daylong “training scenario” for the canines.
“I didn't stack up to my chief's idea of what a heterosexual male should be,” said Rocha, who is gay. “From that, it became a matter of, ‘We're going to make your life miserable because we think you're gay.’ ”
Rocha, now 23, didn't complain about the abuse at the time, fearing that he would be forced to leave the Navy under the military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy. In 2007, he accepted an appointment to the Naval Academy prep school in Rhode Island but decided to acknowledge his homosexuality so he could work to change the military's policy regarding gays. He received an honorable discharge.
Nearly three years after his tour as a dog handler ended, Rocha's anger at Toussaint hasn't subsided. Rocha said yesterday that he was glad to see his former commander finally punished but would like him to face a court-martial.
Rocha's news interviews attracted the attention of U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, R-Pa., a retired Navy vice admiral. Sestak asked Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, to look into the claims, which led to yesterday's decision to discipline Toussaint.
“Adm. Roughead found that the incidents were not in keeping with Navy values and standards and violated the Navy's long-standing prohibition against hazing,” Smith, the Navy spokeswoman, said in written statement. “Our sailors are to be treated with dignity and respect in a healthy and positive working environment.”
Rocha said he is glad that Roughead and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who issued the letter of censure, have taken a stand against harassment.
“We're watching the two most powerful men in the (Navy) stand up for a gay service member,” Rocha said. “I think this will have an impact globally on the way service members are treated.”
Roughead yesterday also directed the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to interview officers assigned to Bahrain when the hazing occurred to see whether more actions should be taken.
Sestak said he was pleased to see someone held responsible for the abuse.
“The astonishing absence of accountability in this case throughout the chain of command was inexcusable,” the congressman said.
Sestak also referred to Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer Valdivia, who took Toussaint's place leading the unit and committed suicide while the investigation was under way.
Rocha, who considered Valdivia a friend and mentor, said Valdivia was trying to leave the Navy when she was ordered to stay in Bahrain and face disciplinary action for failing to stop the abuse.
The reasons for Valdivia's decision to kill herself aren't known, but she wrote on her MySpace page that she was tired of taking blame for others' actions.
Sestak linked Valdivia's death to the abuses.
“As a result of the criminal abuse committed in the Bahrain dog unit, a life has been lost and irreparable harm done to sailors involved,” Sestak said.
Don't fink so.
This all boils down to one thing: once homosexuals in the military are identified, the homicide clock is ticking. If commanders are wise, they will let it be known that under no circumstances will the motive for the homicide of a homosexual be given as based on his sexuality.
Whoever kills them, and the entire investigation, will focus on some, any, other motive for the killing. Even when arrested, the killer will be told in no uncertain terms that *any* other reason for the killing will result in a reduced sentence, but if the killer insists on confessing to killing the homosexual because he was a homosexual, he will get the maximum punishment in the harshest circumstances.
This is because commanders will know that even if a dozen homosexuals in their command are murdered, if any other motive exists for their killing, they, and their command may not be punished.
However, if a homosexual is killed “because” he was a homosexual, the commander will likely be relieved of duty, along with their subordinate leaders, and the unit will be subjected to extended and humiliating group punishment, likely by both military and non-military inquisitors and tormentors.
If the military investigators investigating the homicide insist that the real motive be included, then it will be made clear by the commanding officer that the investigators will be punished first, and hardest.
This duplicity is not by choice, but is forced by political leaders so naive, yet stubborn, in their demands for homosexual integration, that they are willing for any number of homosexuals to be murdered to justify their arrogance.
This does neither the military, nor homosexuals, any justice. Whereas before, if a homosexual was caught committing a homosexual act in the military, they would be quietly and honorably discharged; this has been traded for having homosexuals murdered.
And there is nothing these arrogant political leaders can do to stop it.
Our future:
THE PINK SWASTIKA
“the essential relationship between Nazism and the German “gay” movement become clear.”
http://www.defendthefamily.com/pfrc/books/pinkswastika/html/the_pinkswastika_4th_edition_-_final.htm
Ummm, did you read the article? Or do you just launch into incoherent rants against gays in the military whenever you see the topic mentioned?
There is no allegation here that any homosexual person was murdered. There is a very much alive gay man telling the story of the uncivilized and illegal hazing of the entire unit under the command of a presumably heterosexual officer, and the subsequent suicide of a female commanding officer whose sexual orientation is not mentioned at all.
He isn't an officer. He is enlisted.
This was discussed a while back. Other information:
“The documented hazing and abuse, much of it directed at Petty Officer 3rd Class Joseph Rocha, eventually drove Rocha out of the Navy. Rocha said he became the target after he refused the services of a prostitute, causing some sailors at the kennel to question his sexuality. Rocha, now 23, gave up an appointment to the Naval Academy after telling a commanding officer in 2007 that he was gay and suffering from post-traumatic stress brought on by the abuse.”
The point to my “rant” as you call it was to point out that homosexuality, real *or imagined*, in the military, since Bill Clinton, has become a death sentence.
This case is actually atypical, because homicide *did not* result. Even back in the 1980s, before Clinton, I was more than aware of a large number of personnel who had an almost instinctual, violent repulsion to homosexuals. Not what some would call “homophobic”, but more along the lines of “homopsychotic”.
And such individuals can neither be distinguished from other personnel, counseled or corrected from this behavior. It is so severe that even humorously referring to homosexuals or homosexuality in the military is very dangerous. It would be as inappropriate as talking about bomb making in front of the TSA, before boarding an aircraft.
Because commanders are more than aware of this, since the time when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell came into effect, if they had any sense at all, they would not report the murder of a homosexual as being based on the victims sexuality. Instead, by falsely reporting the motive to be something else, both they and their unit would not be subject to recrimination.
Otherwise, the murderer would still be punished for committing murder, so there would be no great miscarriage of justice.
Ironically, none of what I am saying is particularly anti-homosexual. I am just pointing out what happens when foolish political leaders attempt to challenge professional soldiers at an almost instinctual level. It’s not going to work.
Pretty serious charges, I’m sure that you have plenty of strong evidence to back up your claims. Right?
When you are a military leader, you are responsible for everything your unit does or fails to do.
When I flunked my first ARTEP, I suppose I could have blamed my squad leaders for not performing their duties. NO...I was the platoon leader, and I was responsible. I learned from the mistakes I made, and took corrective action.
I sense we're not getting the fully story behind her suicide.
When I was an E-4 I was a Petty Officer Third Class, the equivalent of a Corporal in the Army.
“We’re watching the two most powerful men in the (Navy) stand up for a gay service member,” Rocha said. “I think this will have an impact globally on the way service members are treated.”
DESPITE the fact that the gay service member lied on his entry application, concealed his service-inconsistent status and continued to take a paycheck under false pretenses. They stood up AGAINST inexcusable conduct, not FOR homosexual rights or protections. Let’s get it right.
And “Roughead”? Some stuff ya just can’t make up...
Colonel, USAFR
I'll be honest. I'm having a difficult time buying Rocha's accounts of hazing, only because they do not resemble whatsoever the navy I am currently serving and have served for the past six years.
I have gone on two full carrier deployments and have never heard of hazing more severe than the voluntary punches to the arm on "frocking" day after advancement results come out. Furthermore, I have never heard of such hazing from my fellow shipmates. I have seen many sailors in port cavort with hookers but I've also seen many more who do not and I've never seen or heard of a sailor getting harassed for turning down a prostitute.
I just don't really know what to say about this article. The accusations seem so alien to what I've experienced.
You want evidence of the concealment of evidence? Heck, even the RAND Corporation couldn’t find that. However, the Los Angeles Times did poll military personnel, who “lo and behold”, strongly agree with me.
“The Los Angeles Times survey of 2,346 military enlisted personnel found that 80 percent believed that removed the restriction would result in violence against homosexuals. In the Marines, the percentage was 90 percent.”
So the question becomes, would this violence be homicide, and if so, would military commanders report it as a “hate crime” against a homosexual?
According to Bill Clinton, in a published interview in the New York Times, (according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff) if homosexual soldiers were allowed to be truthful, military commanders feared disruption or worse from a viscerally anti-gay core of their troops, which they estimated to run about 30 percent.
So the question then becomes, what will the Pentagon and civilian leadership of the military do, when they learn of the murder of a “protected class” of military personnel? Their options are limited.
They can remonstrate with the chain of command, put a black mark on their records, relieve them outright. They can also require yet more onerous “political education” classes of the officers and enlisted personnel. Yet none of this does anything more than anger and abuse the unit, and it is seen as mass punishment.
So how difficult is it for a military commander to protect his unit, his command staff, and himself from such abuse, by avoiding the issue?
Not very difficult at all. The homosexual will still be dead, and the killer will still go to prison. But people who had nothing to do with the murder will not be punished as well. As such, it is justice, after a fashion.
I cannot blame the military for avoiding needless problems created by others.
The “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing is insane, and it’s pathetic that it survived 8 years of the Bush admnistration.
Personally, I think there shouldn’t be any discrimination against against qualified homosexual citizens who choose to serve in the military. The term “homophobic” really ought to be reserved for mental illness, just like the more severe manifestation that you’re calling “homopsychotic”. A phobia is a mental illness, and it’s an inappropriate label for people who are opposed to homosexuality (whether for reasons of ignorance/prejudice or carefully thought-out religious or philosphical beliefs). I’ve noted before that someone really needs to come up with a practical alternative that gets the meaning across without implying mental illness (”sexual orientationist” would properly correspond to “racist”, “sexist”, etc, but is obviously too much of a mouthful to ever catch on).
But true homophobia — i.e. a pervasive irrational fear that causes people to act in ways that are clearly self-destructive and/or not in accordance with their own professed beliefs and goals — IS a mental illness, and we shouldn’t have our military staffed with people who suffer from real mental illness. Someone who is unable to behave and function normally in the presence of someone they perceive to be homosexual is mentally ill to a degree not compatible with military service. And if we didn’t have homophobes in the military, then it wouldn’t be a problem to have openly gay people in the military (assuming they’re held to the same standards re public displays of affection, etc, that everybody else is).
It’s politically incorrect, but important, to note that the “large number of personnel who have an almost instinctual, violent repulsion to homosexuals” you speak of are nearly all if not 100% male personnel. Fact is, it’s rare for women to to be so insecure about and focused on their sexual identity, that they just can’t think or act rationally in the presence of someone they perceive to be a lesbian. It may make many of them a bit uncomfortable, but when was the last time you heard of a heterosexual female servicemember engaging in any sort of out-of-control behavior (not necessarily violent, since we know men are just more prone to violence in any setting) triggered by just having to serve side by side with an lesbian who was minding her own business and not making sexual overtures to anyone?
The sensible approach, IMO, would be to ignore political correctness, drop the don’t-ask-don’t-tell nonsense completely, and drop any prohibition/discrimination for female servicemembers, and allow gay men to serve in the military on a case-by-case basis (evaluated both with regard to what type of service they’re being recruited for, and to their personal history and characteristics). Male military culture is not going to accept someone who’s going from being drag queen performer at a gay night club to enlisting as a combat duty soldier, but on the other hand, the military has lost or declined to hire some much-needed foreign language specialists because they were gay men (or women) who refused to participate in the don’t-ask-don’t-tell idiocy. Well-educated, talented Americans always have better options than subjecting themselves to that sort of crap. Turning away, for example, a fluent Pashtun speaker who would be working at the Pentagon translating intercepted communications, because he’s a gay man living with his longtime male partner, is not in the best interests of our national security.
Technically, but he was officially calling the shots in this unit, so to the people under he was functioning as their commanding officer.
In the mean time a Staff NCO, of the female gender, is under the eye, for real or imagined offenses and blames a Command NCO for her problem and takes the gas pipe, my take I am confused.
That's exactly what the "don't ask, don't tell" policy instructs servicemembers to do. Idiotic, of course, but with a policy like that explicitly in place, you can't fault a servicemember for "concealing" their homosexuality. He was just "don't telling".
A Senior CPO is enlisted...but don’t take it from the daughter-in-law of a Master Chief (now retired) or the wife of a former Special Warfare sailor (the unit is question was his first duty station in the Navy).
Nobody got murdered. That’s why I questioned the “rant” about murders of homosexuals in the military.
When I got my “6” Nailed on I was unfit for duty the next day, not to mention the Libation demanded for a show of orders.
You apparently don’t know much about naval organizational structure.
I’m not arguing with the technical classification. But somebody you have to take orders from is commonly called an “officer” in everyday speech — and the notion that somebody whose title includes the word “officer” is not an officer is a peculiar military usage. He outranked the men he was supervising, and exerted a lot of control over their lives — he was not just one of their peers.
That may fly on du or kos but not here.
Bottom line is that homosexuality is a mental illness, an aberration and is destructive to unit integrity. Fielding the Military is a Constitutional duty, a same sex dating club or social experiment is not part of it.
You received a reasoned, cogent reply and all you have is a snarky comment. That is disrespectful. Haul your snarky Ummmm butt somewhere else.
I questioned the poster's serious claims against the US military and asked for evidence. The evidence provided was a poll from a homosexual advocacy outlet and statements from a former liar in chief.
The reply was hardly reasoned or cogent. Please don't feel bad if I don't take your advice.
WTF are you talking about?
A chief Petty Officer is a Non Commissioned Officer.
Equivelent to a Seargent in the Army or Airforce.
They are enlisted, not Officer.
No, I am a reluctant member of the dumb-ass squad. I was attempting to address two issues in two windows. I think I was making a go at saying that Non-Commissioned Officers (NCO's) are enlisted without a commission from the President but perform many of the duties of a commissioned officer. Regrettably for me that did not work out well. My apologies.
No problem. Apology sincerely accepted.
Unfortunately, it comes down to a numbers game. That is, what is more important to mission accomplishment, having a small number of homosexuals in the military, or having ten thousand times more personnel who have a problem serving with homosexuals in the military?
I do not know if Bill Clinton accurately reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told him that 30 percent of military personnel would be a “viscerally anti-gay core”, but if even 3 percent (of active duty personnel only) were that way, it would still amount to over 44,000 personnel who could turn unpredictably violent.
That is equivalent to an entire Corps of active duty personnel. And they could be anywhere, doing anything, and of any rank.
But my original point was quite simple. Military commanders have been effectively, and now maybe even more so, *ordered* to accommodate open homosexuals in their units. There is no conceivable way they can protect them from who knows how many individuals that may actively seek them out to harm or kill them.
But when they are killed, even though it was truly a “1 on 1” situation, that commander, his staff, and his unit will be unfairly blamed for not preventing an event they could not foresee or prevent.
If, but only if, that crime is attributed to being a “hate crime”. And if that homosexual is killed for any other reason at all, all the innocent people will be left alone.
So my argument isn’t anti-homosexual *or* pro-homosexual. Just a statement of what may have been going on for years, with little or no mention, and will now probably intensify, but still have little or no mention.
My source also mentioned the testimony of a Marine Corps Colonel who said that he did not want one of his sons, a homosexual, to serve in the military, out of concern that he would be attacked.
So I am not alone in this opinion.
Let us talk about Command Responciblilty, shoulder stuff, Gold Braid and all that stuff.
I’ve read your post twice and I still am not sure what you are trying to say. I’m not going to read it again but it almost sounds like you think murder is less of a problem than arrogance of political officials, or something like that.
What is surprising, in a “don't ask don't tell” environment, is the number of former military MEN filing claims with the VA for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder related to military sexual trauma. While this is purely conjecture, most men would not consider physical advances by a woman as “rape” (unless it were Helen Thomas). So, again pure conjecture, these claims are homosexual rape. And, also conjecture, a man is not going to claim he was raped by another man unless he actually was raped by another man.
The obvious point is, if military sexual trauma occurs on nearly equal numbers to women and to men (it does; the numbers support this), homosexual rape when admitting to homosexuality is cause for discharge, what will happen when homosexuality is, defacto, authorized by an appeal of D-A-D-T? Homosexuals serving openly in the military will be preying openly in the military.
The consequences for recruitment are obvious. Recruitment is not a net-sum-zero equation. The argument that we need to allow gays to serve in order to meet recruitment quotas ignores the very real impact of loss of recruitment and re-enlistment of those who do not want to serve in an environment reminiscent of a night on the town in San Francisco.
No, murder is murder, and murder should be punished. What I stated was that punishing a chain of command and an entire large military unit, because an individual who hates homosexuals killed a homosexual, will be avoided by commanders who reclassify the motive of the murder as being something other than homosexuality.
As an unrelated example, I lived on a post with a high pregnancy rate among young, unmarried enlisted females. The solution to this was to require *all* females, including senior enlisted and officers, to attend birth control seminars on a monthly basis. This is typically how the military deals with focused problems. This also made the female senior NCOs and officers very, very angry.
If a command reports that a homosexual has been killed by someone who hates homosexuals, the response will be to punish the chain of command of the killer, even though he had given no indication that he hated homosexuals before. Then the entire large unit will be required to attend mandatory “sensitivity” training, likely taught by the one black female junior officer who is tasked with being the RR/EO officer in every unit she ever belongs to (and resents it terribly, with considerable justification.)
The result of these mandatory “sensitivity” training, self-criticism seminars will be to intensify the hatred of homosexuals by those personnel who already hate homosexuals.
So not only is an entire command staff and major unit tormented for something over which they had no control, but it has just the opposite of the intended effect.
This is why most commanders will figure out that it is better for everyone concerned if the official motive of the murder is “petty theft” instead of “a hate crime against a homosexual.”
Does it make sense now?
No. but at least I understand your point. This is the part that does not make sense
The result of these mandatory “sensitivity” training, self-criticism seminars will be to intensify the hatred of homosexuals by those personnel who already hate homosexuals
If there is such an intensification, why wouldn't it be against those attacking rather than those being attacked?
That would mean haters hating themselves, and that is not going to happen. People cannot be group counseled out of instinctual hatred. They do, however, become contemptuous of their counselor, and far more adept at concealing their hatred.
Counseling only works when people want to change. Otherwise they see it as oppression.
See, this is what concerns me. It IS a sign of mental illness when someone is prone to becoming "unpredictably violent" with no rational provocation. Honestly, I strongly suspect (and there may be some research out there to back it up), that there's a huge correlation between men who are apt to suddenly turn violent towards a man they perceive to be homosexual, and men who are apt to suddenly turn violent towards their girlfriends and wives. They've got a dangerous degree of insecurity about their "manhood", and are thus easily provoked into asserting it in a way that seems "manly" to them, i.e. violence.
I'd be more than happy to those 44,000 (or however many it really is) tossed out of the military if they could be identified. Hard to say what portion of that number would be made up by competent and valuable gay and gay-friendly servicemembers who otherwise wouldn't have joined or stayed. Almost certainly not as many as were lost, but this would be at least somewhat offset by the ancillary benefits to the military losing the herd of dangerously insecure loose cannons.
And from a national political standpoint, the longer term effect would probably be excellent (and probably ultimately make up the lost numbers from the military with gay and gay-friendly recruits). The discriminatory policies against gays in the military is one of the key issues that the left uses to keep many people leftist and anti-military. The combination of getting rid of the policies and having more gay men and openly gay women in the military (I think there's already a huge population of gay women in the military), and thus more leftish-leaning people having gay friends in the military, would go a long way to take the edge off this favorite wedge issue of leftists -- it would eliminate the line of thinking "if I'm not anti-gay (or if I AM gay), I must be Democrat/liberal/anti-war". That's actually a fairly very sizeable chunk of the reasonable, voting population, and especially of the young, reasonable, voting population. The future of freedom can ill afford to have all these people tuning of the whole Constitutional conservative line of political thought, because they feel that they and their friends are unwelcome in such circles.
But the immediate reality, of course, is that there IS that big, not clearly identifiable group of clinically homophobic loose cannons in the military, and it's not practical to suddenly foist of bunch of openly gay men on them -- mission accomplishment does need to come first. But a policy of having gays serve openly on a case by case basis would be a good way to bring about change gradually, and without disrupting the mission. Unfortunately, the loud-mouthed gay activists would rant up a storm against any such suggestion, so it's definitely not something President Obama can afford to do. Maybe the next Republican President can. All I know is that this absurd "don't ask, don't tell" scheme needs to killed off as soon as it can be done practically. It's an embarrassment to both the right and left, which no one can make an intellectually honest defense of.
I also think it's worth comparing this situation to the integration of blacks into the military. There were certainly a lot of whites, especially Southern whites, who had some deep-rooted psychological issues re blacks. The Jim Crow laws were essentially a huge symptom of "blackophobia", with whites terrified that if blacks were allowed to mingle freely with whites, people might starting thinking that the whites weren't really any better than blacks. This was a concept that many whites just couldn't handle, because they were fundamentally insecure about their self-worth and social standing. And male "blackophobes" certainly had a long of track record of being provoked into sudden bouts of extreme violence by blacks they perceived to be stepping over the line. The military basically dealt with this by telling the blackophobes to "get over it immediately, or else". A white man who couldn't manage to perform his duties and conform to military standards when working side by side with blacks was subject to the same consequences as any servicemember who couldn't cut it for any other reason -- and I'm sure some whites left the military (some voluntarily and some involuntarily) over this, and others declined to join, but overall the effect was positive, at least within a couple of decades. By and large, this was a pretty effective approach.
She wasn’t a commanding officer, just an LPO (leading petty officer), an NCO. What a terrible story and a black eye for my Navy.
There are a few bad assumptions there. To start with, those individuals who are vehemently anti-homosexual are not necessarily wife and child abusers. Just as likely, they are the best combat soldiers.
As an aside, though it would go against the entire principle of “mass armies” that has existed since Napoleon, I suspect that the truth is that there are a very small, elite few among combat soldiers who are truly gifted as fighters. They are worth 100 ordinary trained men in their fighting abilities. This is seen in martial arts as well—the few who will be champions, no matter what their fighting style, run circles around everyone else.
It has long been noted that such warriors in the military do the vast majority of the fighting for their squad, platoon, or even company. And, a potential correlation, they are noted by their technical peers as having “strong instincts”.
Having met a few such individuals, and seen them demonstrate extraordinary skills, my opinion would be that it would be foolish to challenge them. But I also noted that the strong instincts they use to be superb fighters are also a potential weak point.
For example, I saw a highly decorated combat senior NCO, pale and shaking, when he saw a teenage girl at risk and scared. His instincts were so strong that was it a combat situation, he would have been incapacitated, and unable to lead.
Importantly, his value in a combat situation would be incalculable, compared to the value of any number of teen girls. A hundred, or a thousand, and he would have still been worth far more.
This fact, and that so many combat soldiers share his instinctual phobia, is enough reason to exclude females from combat, even if they would otherwise be fine combatants. Personally, I knew a wit would said that he “would have no trouble sending females out to draw fire”, but he was not what I would call a great soldier.
Another example was of an again, highly decorated Green Beret Master Sergeant who was terrified half to death after watching the TV show “Scared Straight”. Prisoners trying to scare teenagers against crime, so they wouldn’t be raped in prison.
The Master Sergeant was messed up for two days. On the first day babbling about one prisoner and his “brides”. Then, ominously, on the second day, he was babbling to the effect of “They will never take me alive!”
This is a good example of what I call “homopsychotic”. I knew this Master Sergeant for three years, and he was an extraordinary soldier and leader. His career was exemplary, yet anyone identified as a homosexual I would advise to stay far away from him.
The Green Berets put their personnel through extraordinarily challenging mental exercises, designed to reveal weaknesses and flaws under conditions of extreme stress. They found nothing in his personality so aberrant as to even be worth mention.
Another bad assumption is to compare this with the integration of black soldiers into the military. Again, for reasons of instinct. This is because racial hatred is “sociopathic”, learned, not instinctual. As such, it can be unlearned.
This isn’t to say unlearning racism is easy. It isn’t, and lots of personnel are discharged and otherwise punished every year, for things like a slip of the tongue, using a racial epithet, even out of a racial context.
However, racism is *easy* to unlearn, compared to an instinctual reaction like ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes. In that case, I saw a brilliant cavalry officer destroy his ceremonial chrome saber, because someone put a spring loaded rubber snake in his desk. A man who would have been utterly fearless facing a Soviet armored brigade, yet who lost his marbles over a rubber snake.
The very idea that a very competent killer like that would hate and fear homosexuals, makes me question whether anything a homosexual might do in the military is both worth it to the mission, and to the risk of their life. Even if they have a very valuable skill, it won’t do any good if some corporal they have never met walks up behind them and plants a steak knife in their back.
There’s BIG difference between “vehemently anti-homosexual” and “prone to becoming unpredictably violent towards homosexuals”. And I don’t agree that this sort of out-of-control reaction to actual or perceived homosexuals is instinctive, any more than wifebeating is instinctive. There’s a lot of cultural learning underlying it. I think 50 years ago you wouldn’t have had any trouble finding educated Southern white men who would assert that it was “instinctive” for a white man to undertake violent retribution against a black man who he perceived to be “flirting” with his wife or daughter, even when he wouldn’t react the same way to an identical type of “flirting” by a white man.
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