Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” lacks merit in at least three areas. Repeal means institutionalizing threats to the religious liberty of Chaplains and other service members. Homosexuality must also estrange itself from medicine and science in order to fabricate a social justice issue. Finally, arguments maintaining that open homosexuality will not hurt morale declaim the character of military operations.
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers find their Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion threatened by the repeal. For many followers of desert religions, who send their pastors into the chaplaincy and their believers into military service, homosexual behavior is unacceptable. Instead it resides among the myriad sins entrapping humanity that lives in a fallen world with a fallen nature.
For them foundational scholarship concludes homosexual relationships separate believers from God. The Old Testament, holy to “People of the Book”, speaks of the character, identity, and purpose of God in a manner, which continuously addresses homosexuality. God is spoken of as masculine, and all humans become feminine in relation to Him. In addition to creating all things, God created the single institution of heterosexual marriage as the earthy manifestation of the relationship of the absolute unity and love He seeks with each person. Classical Semitic theology emphasizes searching for, and identifying with God in the spiritual dimension. In order to be “good” actions and thoughts must reinforce the faith commitment to relationship. There are huge numbers of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers for whom any subsequent reasoning from scriptures must proceed from that basic understanding. Therefore after repeal, when believers reject homosexuality in counseling rolls or in common life expressions, they would become guilty by popular acclamation of at least cultural prejudice.
Advocates for repeal find foundational medical and scientific credibility in the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality as a mental disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Removal followed a two year campaign Newsweek described as ongoing disruptive, chaotic attacks on psychiatrists and physiologists. Yet throughout these disruptive attacks, no academic papers were presented at conferences refuting any research previously done.
Eventually onslaughts forced sufficient abstentions and apprehensive responses for a third of APA’s 17,000 plus membership to approve removal. The under-voting and public attacks support the understanding that the DSM is as likely to accumulate political manifestos and marketing brochures as attempts at scientific exposition.
After this decision a new task force was established to ensure perpetual sanctity for the APA action. No research papers would again arise to confirm initial therapy success rates of 30% to 60 %, substantiating that 7 of 10 homosexuals could eventually walk away from the lifestyle forever. This task force would set peer review standards mandating pre-ordained theses, acceptable flexibility in research design definitions, and acceptable human data points. Psychology and Psychiatry chose to relinquish scientific rigor for popular societal and political acclaim.
My Representative presents an argument in favor of repeal, which betrays a basic misunderstanding of the character of military service. He says, “The private, legal sexual conduct of military personnel off duty and off base, whether homosexual or heterosexual, should not be of interest to the Pentagon leadership. The bottom line is that an individual’s performance in uniform is what should count. Sexual contact on base is already governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) - the judicial code that all military personnel are subject to.”
Yet military operations to protect this country are not conducted in garrison, and offer no opportunities for off duty or private time. Operating military personnel, locked in small task oriented units, forward deploy, and continuously face extraordinary stress if not actual combat. These environments are inherently chaotic and brittle, and can only be overcome by totalitarian authority unimaginable in pacific situations. At this point Psychology and Psychiatry should make a meaningful contribution, but their 1973 decision enables base antidotal politics to dominate the debate.
This debate should not veer into secular humanist social justice. The primary issues to consider should be Constitutional religious freedom, and whether any mental disorders can be tolerated within the exceptional human structures needed to defeat enemies unconcerned with social engineering.
Excellent post. It is amazing that this issue is even being discussed, since it throws all the basic logic and precepts of the United States on its head. Besides all the religious aspects that this policy will impact, I find the fact that it goes against the fundamental founding of this country even more troubling—upon Natural Law Theory and God’s Laws.
I find just the secular argument that homosexuality is a natural act full of non logic and lies. Logic, science, and reason are not possible if you attempt to include such nonsense as such. Of course, the Progressives do not want logic and reason and science to interfere with their conditioning and indoctrination into their “proper way to think”. They want moral relativism to create supreme chaos so we will all demand a nanny state.