Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I know it was last week, so I may be straining your memories here, but remember those comments that General Peter Pace made about homosexuals when he was asked about the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy?  I have some thoughts.

My issue is not with DADT itself.  The policy is useless and self-defeating, aiming to strangle discrimination to death via enforced secret keeping and dishonesty.  At best, DADT accomplishes nothing, and at worst it forces the military to dishonorably discharge those that break it or create an unnecessary psychological burden on those that don’t.  It is a codified closet from the tail end of a bygone era, and it should obviously be done away with.  Pace’s comments, though vehemently anti-gay, argue for the end of DADT in a weirdly bigoted, passive-aggressive way.  So…thank you?

More importantly, you’ve got the irony of a military general talking about morality.  Peter?  Buddy?  You’re the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.  You’re the head of an organization whose job it is to render destruction unto our enemies in the most efficiently calculated way possible.  It is part of your job to describe mass murder in terms of collateral damage.   Yet you hold up your dislike of homosexuals as if it’s some great moral watermark that rises above the bloodied waters of your job description.  To have no problem with fighting (killing) insurgents and to simultaneously express moral outrage at your gay servicemen is to split some awfully crazy hairs.  Don’t even get me started on the false distinction between homosexuals and “homosexual acts” that you trotted out in defense of your, if you’ll excuse the term, cockeyed opinion.

Pace’s predecessor, John Shalikashvili, is being lauded by gay rights groups for reversing his stance on DADT.  What Shalikashvili actually said was that he now believes that openly gay servicemen will not undermine troop cohesion, which was the original justification for DADT.  He adds, “Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.”  In this statement there seems to be an undercurrent of, “Under the circumstances, we’ll take what we can get.”  Is he saying that by allowing openly gay men and women to serve, the military is compromising itself or lowering its standards?  I think he is.  I can’t believe he’s being called corageous for this.