A Thousand Points Of Blindness

The striking thing about the letter organized by the Christianist Center For Military Readiness is the complete absence of any evidence or substantiation for its assertions, or indeed any engagement with the arguments involved at all. This sentence stands out:

We believe that imposing this burden on our men and women in uniform would undermine recruiting and retention, impact leadership at all levels, have adverse effects on the willingness of parents who lend their sons and daughters to military service, and eventually break the All-Volunteer Force.

The idea that allowing a small minority of service members to tell the truth if they so wish about their sexual orientation would "break" the military is just bizarre.

One of the retired generals, Carl Mundy, says:

"We just see a great many downsides to attempting to enforce on the military something I don't know is widely accepted in American society," he said.

The latest poll shows that 75 percent of the country supports ending the gay ban. That is not "widely accepted"? To give you an idea of where this guy's coming from, here's what he said in 1993:

"In the military skills, we find that the minority officers do not shoot as well as the non-minorities. They don't swim as well. And when you give them a compass and send them across the terrain at night in a land navigation exercise, they don't do as well at that sort of thing."

Why do all these bigotries run together? And why should a man who said such a thing still be taken the slightest bit seriously?