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The awful truth: an almost total conservative silence on the homosexualization of the military
In the 12 days since its passage, while I have been posting one article on the subject after another, I have had a growing sense, without knowing it for a fact, that there had been very little conservative response, let alone opposition, to the revolutionary law repealing the prohibition of homosexuality in the military. I had intended to look this up myself but hadn’t gotten around to it. So yesterday I asked readers to send me any such articles they had seen, and I posted the readers’ responses in the same entry. What began to emerge, thanks especially to the researches of Kathlene M., was a picture of a conservative movement in which various prominent figures and organizations are supporting the new law, and few, except for dedicated social-conservative organizations, are opposing it.
Now Kathlene has come upon a conservative writer, at the Christian site Black Conservative, who has found an almost total conservative and Christian silence on the issue, and is as shocked and disturbed by this development as I am:
DADT and the Silence of Conservative Media by Jason Lovelace
It has been interesting to note the response from conservatives concerning the recent overturn of DADT. In the days leading up to and following, very, very little has been mentioned by those in conservative media concerning the implications of ending DADT and allowing people who are shooing an openly homosexual lifestyle to serve in uniform. Out of all the conservative authorship and columnists over the days following the “historic” overturn of DADT, nothing has been written in opposition to this event; that’s right, friends NOTHING has been written. The only writer, columnist, or author that has had the courage to stand against the overturn of DADT has been Anne Coulter, and Miss Coulter’s pieces came out before DADT was overturned in the Senate. Same is said of Fox News Journalist and Conservative Author, Lt. Col. (Ret) Oliver North.
While these authors and articles wrote their musings and articles before the recent vote in the Senate, again, NOTHING has been written or spoken by anyone in Conservative media since. The silence from the right and from conservative outlets is deafening, and yet it is also a tragedy. While decrying other aspects of conservative principles, the sad reality is that most conservatives have been relatively silent concerning DADT and the “right” of homosexuals to openly serve in the United States’ Military. Rush Limbaugh—celebrated and sensational conservative pundit and radio personality has, since the December 19th [sic] Senate Vote, posted naught concerning DADT on his website. The website of Sean Hannity, noted Fox News personality and radio talk-show host, was also bereft of any kind of response to the overturn of DADT by Congress. The Talkshow of G. Gordon Liddy—former President Nixon aide—was also silent concerning DADT. The Conservative News Site, World Net Daily (www.wnd.com) had but one story copied from the New York Times, but no reply or rebuttal of their own following the vote in the Senate.
At the conservative site, Hot Air (www.hotair.com), one columnist even went so far as write “I support the move.” In fact, stories have even posted at HotAir which have indirectly praised the repeal of DADT. [LA replies: I’ve noted before that Allahpundit, the main blogger at HotAir, is really a liberal. Probably the only issue he is “conservative” on is that we should have a war on terror.] So far, very, very few conservative pundits, commentators, and columnists have bothered to speak up and out against the repeal of DADT. In fact, the only reaction to this historic senate vote has come from former Nixon and Reagan aide and former Presidential Candidate, Pat Buchanan and Senator John McCain (R-AZ). Aside from these, there has been no response, no reply from any conservative leader, columnist, pundit, journalist, commentator, or personality.
- end of initial entry -
December 31, 2010
Jim C. writes:
Let’s wait and see what happens. If there is a problem, we’ll be sure to find out.
Remember, the most important issues are security, immigration, and the economy.
LA replies:
This is the “conservative triage” I talked about here, a whole new way for conservatives to rationalize their surrender to liberalism, or, in many cases, their simple agreement with liberalism. Anyone who says, for example, that homosexuality in the military is not an important issue and not worth fighting, but homosexual “marriage” is an absolutely crucial issue and is worth fighting, is failing to see that the first leads to the second and removes key arguments against the second.
This article which a reader sent, “Ending the fibbing: The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may be the least of our problems,” by Joel Belz at WorldMag.com, also seems to be an example of the conservative triage. Here are Belz’s opening paragraphs, a masterpiece of confusion:
There may be at least two good reasons not to be overly concerned about the repeal by Congress of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that for a long time prohibited the open service of homosexuals in the U.S. military.
The first is that the underlying assumptions of the existing policy were themselves ethically and morally shabby. For most of two decades, we have lived with a policy of pretense. To keep living a deliberate if quiet lie, and to do so as a matter of official policy, is hardly to aim at a constructive solution to any problem.
The second reason is that our society was already on a separate speedway toward the same result. If Congress hadn’t voted as it did, there’s little doubt that our nation’s courts would have brought us to the same shameful end. And probably with unseemly haste.
So I’m not sure we should see what Congress did just before Christmas as a watershed decision. We were already in pretty bad shape.
But if we’re tempted in any way to yawn now and accept what Congress has done with a ho-hum “I-guess-that-was-inevitable” spirit, we need to be radically aroused. Our societal rendezvous with at least three related but much bigger issues has suddenly been radically advanced on the calendar. Any one of the three may—as we engage it—make the military issue seem almost incidental. We may even find ourselves inclined to ask, some time from now: “Why did we waste time on that?”
[End of quote]
So, if these other problems are so much worse, does Belz think that being indifferent to the homosexualization of the military, even calling opposition to it “a waste of time,” will make it easier to oppose these supposedly greater social threats? The man is deluded, and so is every conservative who puts forth the triage argument.
J., a stalwart activist in the anti-Islamization movement, writes from California:
When Norman Mailer wrote many years ago in the Naked and the Dead that the soldiers at the front or in foxholes had to “keep a tight a**hole,” I don’t think they gave a damn about the color of their co-soldier’s skin, nor, I would guess, in the same circumstances, would they care too much today about their homosexuality. Perhaps being black was abhorrent to whites, as may be homosexuality to heterosexuals, but I somehow see them as parallels and don’t get too exercised over it.
David B. writes:
When checking the “conservative” sites for reaction, I have found the response to the repeal has been either silence, indifference, or approval.
Andrew T. writes:
Michael Savage has spoken against it.
LA writes:
Don Feder has written an article against the admission of homosexuals.
Gerry N. writes:
I have just read your posts about the lack of conservative responses (other than acceptance) to the Obama administration’s changes in the law concerning homosexuals in the military. When we remember that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a compromise that the left-wing Clinton administration was forced into because of conservative opposition to his attempts to revolutionize American military policy regarding homosexuality, it is apparent that conservatism has traveled a great distance in quite a short period of time. When we have traveled a long way down a wrong path, it is vital if we are to get back onto the right road, to return to the point where we went astray.
Between Clinton’s passing and Obama’s repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” conservatives abandoned another important plank in the conservative platform regarding sex and the military. I am referring to opposition to women serving in combat roles in the military. George Gilder gave the classic exposition of the conservative position on this years ago: a society must have a next generation to survive, women give birth to and nourish the next generation, therefore a society that wishes to survive sends its men to fight to protect its women and children. In one of his books in the early ‘90’s, Rush Limbaugh defended this position, citing Gilder if I remember correctly.
Over the past decade, however, movement “conservatism” appeared to have reversed its position. It was now lionizing women who served in combat positions in Afghanistan and Iraq. One got the impression that to some conservative pundits, the embarrassment and demoralization that “losing to women” would cause among the Muslim enemy was more important than the principle of protecting mothers and children.
Progressive efforts to reduce the distinction between the sexes to insignificance are an important reason why homosexuality is now celebrated in societies where it was previously frowned upon. When the difference between male and female is no longer treated as being important enough to warrant distinct roles in the family, the workplace, and society in general, it is next to impossible to maintain moral rules about who should be sleeping with whom.
It seems to me then, that the reorientation of conservatism towards a kind of liberal feminism over the course of the past decade is what has led to its silence on homosexuals in the military today. If conservatives are now okay with sending young women into the dangers of combat they have little ground left to stand upon in opposing homosexuals being sent into the same combat.
Recovering the distinction between “he” and “she” then, is a vital first step in the road away from this madness and back to sanity.
Chris B. writes:
I sense the same phenomena among conservatives regards DADT myself, but feel that additional homosexuals in the military in itself will not doom the units. That has already been accomplished by the far more pernicious invasion of the defense forces by women, who physically and psychologically cannot measure up, even though they garner the same wages by rank. But the Republicans (and I believe Tea Parties) are utterly paralyzed by the gender issue. Ideally, the U.S. might do what the ancient Corinthians did. They assigned their gay soldiers to separate units fighting alongside their lovers. The two sources I have read state that they fought furiously, particularly so when their loved ones were killed or wounded. Ideally, if gays and women are to serve, and earn their wages, a brigade sized unit of each would be parachuted into Afghanistan, and there “tested.” Our data crazed officials who run the Pentagon could monitor events closely, and then make some decisions. But we live in a country, the collective mental health of which, has declined to a point where it is far worse than the Greek city states of 2500 years ago (No big surprise).
Howard Sutherland writes:
The social subversion of the armed forces by liberals is by now a long-running show. As people have noted in earlier postings, the federal government has been using the services as social policy rat-labs at least since Robert McNamara’s tenure in the Pentagon. (Anyone else remember “McNamara’s 100,000”: the Vietnam-era force-feeding of Cat IV recruits into the Army and—to a lesser degree—the Marine Corps?) The silence of self-identified conservatives—with a few worthy exceptions—about these deleterious transformations has been nearly as long-running a (non)spectacle as the transformations themselves.
Homosexualising (can that really be a verb?) the military is Stage II of the planned destruction of the military as a fighting force. Feminising (same question!) the military was Stage I and, as far as I can tell from the vantage of a veteran inactive now for 15 years, is effectively complete. By and large, conservatives didn’t really fight that one, either. Partly that was because the feminist cause was advanced by Republican presidents as much as by Democrats: women were admitted to flight schools under Nixon, admitted to the service academies under Ford, were assigned to ships under Reagan (that may have begun under Carter or earlier, but the seagoing Navy became visibly more feminine under Reagan), and all of these things were advanced under both Bushes. Bush I, that heroic Navy veteran, did nothing whatever to reverse the obvious mistake of assigning women to sea duty; Bush II, that less-heroic Air Guard non-veteran, did nothing whatever to reverse Clinton’s opening of combat positions to women, an even more obvious mistake. Quite the contrary! So, continuing to mis-identify Republicanism with conservatism, “conservative” commentators set aside any conservative principles they may have and got with the program.
I believe Stage III will be the deliberate alienation of the armed forces from the nation they purportedly serve through filling the ranks with foreign, largely Mestizo, mercenaries. If non-citizens are allowed to serve as officers, I will consider that particular conspiracy-theory confirmed. (Of course, with expedited naturalization for foreign enlisted men, the fast track into commissioning programs opens for them—expedited, naturally, in almost all cases by racial preferences at the expense of white Americans.) And who will dare oppose the mestization, and risk the inevitable accusations of racism? But I digress …
It’s clear that the housebroken conservative columnists will not criticize the homosexualists’ coup. What of the outliers? One writer—whom I know slightly from Marine Corps days—who has valuable insights about matters military is William Lind. Surely he would have something to say. To my surprise, I have found nothing by him on-line addressing this fall’s “DADT repeal” campaign. I hope Mr. Lind is all right!
On the bright side, though, a worthy foe of the homosexualizers, as she has consistently been of the feminizers as well, is Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness. When I checked CMR’s website, I was glad to see that Mrs. Donnelly has continued to criticise “DADT repeal” even after it was accomplished, rather than bow in resignation to the new order. But she is rare, and CMR seems to me to be losing such influence as it once had. That is a bad sign, because CMR has remained pretty consistent in its advocacy of armed forces normal people would recognize as fighting services. If CMR is alone on the right, it is because the “right” has just kept shifting farther and farther left. And, hard though it is for me to respect him for a host of reasons, it is only fair to acknowledge that Sen. John McCain is not going gently into that bad night over this, either. With his family ties to the old Navy, perhaps he realizes just how outlandish his grandfather and father would have found the situation their service is in today. HRS
LA wrote to Kathlene M.:
How do we continue as conservatives, when other conservatives have sold out like this?
Kathlene M. replies:
I’ve been asking myself the same question these days, about how conservatives can go on when others have sold out? It’s the same question Christians ask, how to keep from feeling all alone when fellow Christians and the world around us keep accepting more and more evil? It’s sometimes hard to remain strong but we continue to do so each day with the grace and faith of God. I keep thinking about these Bible verses from Matthew 24:21-22 in which Jesus said: “For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.” I pray that these days will be shortened.
This also has been on my mind a lot lately, from Matthew 24:10,13.
“At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other … but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.”
Ted G. wrote:
Even Dennis Prager?
He use to talk endlessly about the homosexual movement.
LA replied:
So, please check out what he’s saying since December 18 about homosexuals in the military—if anything—and let us know.
Ted G. replies:
I looked at Prager’s web site and used the search engine for his site and could not come up with anything in writing on site. I don’t know if that means there is nothing there, just that I couldn’t find anything.
However, I did come across an audio file of one hour of his show from 12-20-10. I listened for about a half hour.
He talked about DADT and took several calls. His general position was, I though, some what tepid, “an irresponsible way to change society” but he “hopes and prays that it works.” His major concern I thought was more about how the left does business then the meaning of a growing homosexual movement to a society.
A man called and said his wife was in the service and that both he and her did not like the way they were treated for questioning the growing role of homosexuality (I mean not by the service but the general way any one who does not agree with the new party line is treated.) That is, they have a principled position but are called bigots by the ruling leftist class. He agreed. The other two callers said little of any value that I could see. He indicated (I think ) that there were many callers on the topic but that he would be moving on to a new subject.
LA replies: So there you have it. It’s a non-issue for him. I think you’re right that for many years he condemned the homosexual rights movement. He sees America as a Judeo-Christian society and opposes homosexual “marriage.” But he has no salt in him. Does he think he can dismiss so easily the homosexualization of the military, yet still hold a firm line on marriage? The man’s an empty blatherer.
Doug H. writes:
I saw another article today titled very similar to the one you had although with a Christian message.
http://www.raptureready.com/soap/L66.html
After the scriptures, it goes on with the title “DADT and the Silence of Conservative Media”
The sound of silence is a howling fury.
Dan D. writes:
About eight years ago I joined a church with what seemed to be traditional attitudes regarding life. There was much to do about following the “straight and narrow” path. I didn’t hide my opinion that the gay lifestyle was not only counter to traditional moral standards but was destructive of the person. Nothing was said initially. The congregation dressed up in their Sunday best, the rituals of sacrament were rigorously followed and the sacredness of the family was a main tenet.
But as time passed, hints were dropped to me by various individuals that I should lighten up on the gay issue (I never mentioned such though), that after all white people, as a group, have much to answer for their past sins and that the Church was invited into so many communities because they got along to get along…. that was the way.
Finally I stopped attending, my wife never was happy with my involvement anyway. But the issue of few “conservative” voices rising up against the ubiquitous push to mainstream homosexual behaviour has been raised as a lone voice at VFR needs another explanation.
Somebody said if an organization isn’t explicitly conservative it will become liberal, or progressive as time passes. My view is that since the main forces shaping public opinion push the progressive agenda all institutions are embedded in the same ocean of propaganda and will be “infected” with such attitudes.
So just as the body of the church comes from the same pool of people who are hammered daily by the liberal house organs; media, city, state, schools, group organizations et al, these people may go to church and wear the patina of traditional beliefs but it is just as when the Vandals took on Roman airs, underneath the robes beats the heart of a barbarian.
Official conservative voices are drawn from the same pool of folks, they don’t like being called names either, homophobe, bigot, racist, sexist, nativist et al. I have noticed few (personally none) will challenge the name caller. They will cave, on this issue because those pushing their gay agenda resort bullying at the drop of a hat. There is allowed no room for disagreement. And so here we are today in this Orwellian world where “crimestop” is enforced.
The difference here with repeal of DADT is putting this agenda on a relatively captive group. How will this group react? I am amazed that this issue is considered so important that an institution so vital to our security is so blithly tampered with, but again that was explained by the prescient Orwell.
Crimestop—Orwell’s definition: “The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short…. protective stupidity.” ref: http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/
Kathlene M. writes:
The libertarian “reporter” John Stossel seems to capture the thought of many people these days when he wrote “Where do I come down on this issue [of DADT repeal]? It’s easy. I’m a libertarian, not a conservative. I don’t think government should have any role in our sex lives.”
Every libertarian I’ve come across supports repeal of “DADT” because they believe it suppresses individual liberties. But the point that many libertarians miss is this: they seem to not understand that government, by creating rights for homosexuals, will insert itself into everyone’s individual lives. Creating rights for one group means that government must suppress the rights of another group. We will all be forced to toe the line and conform to the new groupthink. Public school children will face homosexual indoctrination against their parents’ wishes, and religious people (mostly Christians; Muslims will be “protected”) will be told that their faith is bigotry despite the fact that the 1st Amendment guarantees religious freedom.
Not enough conservatives have made the case as to why special rights for homosexuals will undermine the traditional family, and why this will harm our society. Maybe no one cares anymore. If Obama and the Democrats—with the help of Republicans—successfully pass the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and Gay Marriage eventually becomes the new norm across the land, I think conservatism will be officially dead if it isn’t already.
Felicie C. writes:
There is one belief by the leftist establishment that I have always found odd and inconsistent. It might be something that has been already been remarked on by you or your readers on your website, but I am not aware of it. For a leftist, everything under the sun is “constructed.” All kinds of “identities” are merely “social constructions.” In the debate what predominates—nature or nurture—it is clearly nurture that is the universal explanation. And understandably so, from a Vogelinean perspective. Natural limitations are something beyond my control that I will not be able to transcend. I want to keep open my dream of God-like omnipotence. But there is one exception from this rule of constructionism. And that is homosexuality. Just as absolutely as everything else is nurture, homosexuality is nature, and there is nothing that can be done about homosexual tendencies. I wonder whether anyone has pointed this out to a leftist friend?
James N. writes:
“Conservatives” do not oppose gays in the military because they obey the imperative of nondiscrimination.
One curious aspect of obedience to this imperative is that, after the social change wrought by submission to nondiscrimination (whatever it is), it is impossible to discuss the fact that opponents of the change have been proven correct.
Whether the change is the end of colonialism, or black liberation, or female empowerment, or homosexual “marriages”, ALL OF THE RESULTS ARE EXACTLY AS PREDICTED by those in opposition.
But no one, certainly no “conservative” voice, ever says, “I told you so” (“Mencius Moldbug” has written quite a lot of material which quotes 18th and 19th century conservatives predicting with exactitude the events of the 20th century).
This is because “conservative” voices also obey a second liberal imperative, which is, “there’s no turning the clock back”. So deeply rooted is our belief in “progress” that we treat it as a natural phenomenon, like the change of the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun.
So, even when “progress” accomplishes that which we do not desire, most “conservatives” display a bemused acceptance born out of the comfort that, after all, life continues according to its natural order.
Until Alaric is inside the gates, that is.
Stewart W. writes:
I haven’t heard it discussed yet, but I believe the next institution to fall will be the Boy Scouts. Although they have successfully resisted the homosexualist agenda for the last decade, the fight severely weakened the organization, and you already see a significant liberal foothold growing in the central organization. The Scouts are conciously modelled on the military (or at least, the military of 100 years ago). Now that the military has succumbed, the few remaining traditionalists in the Boy Scouts will likely fold in short order. It will be interesting to see how the churches respond, in particular the Mormon Church, who threatened to pull out of the Scouts if they allowed homosexual scout masters. The Mormons are one of the largest supporters of the Boy Scouts, and as you remember, one of the largest opponents of homosexual “marriage”. They are already softening their stance on the latter issue, so I’m worried.
Kathlene M. writes:
I read the beginning of the Don Feder article that you linked. I enjoyed that he referred to RINO Scott Brown as a “Lady Gaga Republican.” This is an apt way to describe Republicans.
You and several readers pointed out correctly weeks ago that Dick Armey and his RINO ilk are attempting to co-opt the Tea Party movement by acting as if Republicans speak for this loose unorganized coalition of angry, disillusioned voters. The subversion has been substantiated by a few bloggers.
The establishment Republicans want to stop the Tea Party movement in its tracks by dictating the terms of the conservative side of the debate to the masses. Thus the establishment has declared that fiscal issues only matter, and social/cultural issues do not. What the Lady Gaga Republicans really mean by this diktat is that there is only one social issue that matters and that is conformity to the incremental pro-homosexualization of society. The homosexual group GOProud has already prevented a few Tea Party rallies from taking place in Massachusetts because these rallies had social issues at the forefront. And of course there was the split at CPAC which is not really conservative but it’s still symbolic of what is happening.
All I can say as a Catholic is that bringing in homosexuals to the priesthood was a disaster. Pope Benedict is still dealing with the fallout from that issue, and has adopted changes in the way priests are selected. They are more carefully screened these days, according to the source I read months ago.
Here is the article about the Pope restricting homosexuals from the priesthood:
“UPDATED NOV. 22, 2005: A controversial Vatican document restricting the admission of gay men to the priesthood, set for official release on Nov. 29, was obtained by an Italian news agency, Adista, and published on Nov. 22. Other news agencies confirmed the authenticity of the document, which says that the church “cannot admit to the seminary and the sacred orders those who practice homosexuality, present deeply-rooted homosexual tendencies or support so-called gay culture.”
David B. writes:
I endorse Howard Sutherland’s comment on the homosexualization of the military as being Step II after feminization. I remember McNamara’s Vietnam-era “Project 100,000” as it was called at the time.
Matthew H. writes:
My response to the silence of so-called conservatives on the sodomization of our Armed Services:
“Treason doth never succeed. What’s the reason? When it succeeds none dare call it treason.”
- Ovid
Like chaff, our “conservative” pundits have just demonstrated that they have no substance. They are like the spiritual children Paul speaks of in Ephesians 4:14 who are “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”
Alan M. writes:
To get to the root of the issue with conservatives holding to conservatism, conservatives have ceded the battlefield by not taking a strong stand on reality, knowledge, and truth. Reason and reality firmly support the traditional conservative world-view while those opposing do so from emotion that thwarts their rational faculties and ability to perceive reality. The left argues for things which in various cases are either illogical and self-contradictory or they disprove by their very choices in life. Most “conservatives” practice liberal “non-discrimination” when it comes to the world of knowledge, thinking that much of what we hold true really only exists in the world of values which happen to have greater utilitarian benefit than those values espoused by the left. Conservatives should hold things to be true because those things are rational and based on real experience of how things are. Liberals hold things to be true because they wish the world to be that way and are emotionally driven—the liberal gnosticism you rightly call out. To handle one potential objection, “love” is not an emotion and that there cannot be love without truth, or Love without Truth.
For conservatives to take any less of a stand than that liberal views are untrue, irrational, self-contradictory and based on emotion is to cede the battle from the beginning. It is not a battle of competing values that have more or less utilitarian benefit but [equal] truth and falsehood. To seek to know less than the truth is to be less than human.
If we do not take this stand, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves. This should be the opening salvo in every debate with liberalism.
God bless and Happy New Year!
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 30, 2010 08:45 AM | Send
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