I Can Haz Rum And Lash Now, Too?

IT made my day this last Saturday to hear Maine Senator Olympia Snowe place the blame for two-hundred-fifty years of sodomitic obsession in the military, including the last seventy of reliance on faux-science declaring the mental and religious disturbances of wealthy white European males to be the baseline for Normalcy, on the "repugnant" DADT compromise of 1993. Snowe--who is known as a Centrist to Beltway insider publications like The Hill, as it saves them typing "a Republican who votes against the ACU on some major subcategory of legislative issues" over and over--had, as we all know, worked tirelessly for the repeal of this moral excrescence ever since the previous Wednesday afternoon. Take that, you Clinton-era compromise of the principles of equality and fair place all Americans hold dear, save the lunatics of my own party!

Of course it should come as no surprise that Snowe clung tenaciously to the moral high ground she summited only after somebody counted the votes for her--she is, after all, a Centrist--but I have to admit that even I was taken aback, for a moment, by the irony- accuracy- and ethics-free attempts to blame the whole thing on Bill Clinton. The AP story which thudded on my doorstep Sunday along with the rest of the worthless Indianapolis Racist Beacon was accompanied by a headline celebrating the end of the "17-year ban on openly gay troops", as though Pork Chop Hill had been held by the Pink Triangle Brigade, or the Rough Riders were, well, the Openly Rough Riders.

It's like blaming Jim Crow laws on the Kennedy Justice Department.

DADT--certainly no one's idea of a perfect piece of legislation--has, at least, the distinction of being a prime example of the sort of compromise legislation the horrible leftist activists who hold the Democratic party in sway were being lectured about just a week ago; the Paleolithic attitudes toward sexual orientation it supposedly engendered are alive and well and living like wet rot in the platform of the Republican party. None of this came through the coverage. Just Olympia Snowe's brave stance after only fifteen years in the Senate and the reassurances of the Joint Chiefs.

It is worth noting that the present law--until the current pending legislation replaces it--makes homosexuality grounds for discharge, but sexual activity between members of the same gender is not, provided one can prove that one is not homosexual. It might also be noted that what is actually being repealed is the Pentagon's PR response to the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1970s, when it stepped up efforts to expel gays as a sop to the officer corps' political beliefs, the way women were not permitted in combat until our desire to smack around every tenth-rate country that sass-mouthed us made it necessary to look the other way, and the way the Air Force Academy is now the third largest evangelical mega-church west of St. Louis. So, too, might we mention the faux-science which helped make all this possible, in the 1940s, by declaring homosexuality a form of psychopathy, an attitude which continues officially to this moment. The military, like the Republican party, has a long history of looking the other way about actual sodomy; its principled opposition to homosexuality as a concept dates merely to the opportunity to oppose The Left in retaliation for its being right about incontinent military adventurism and perpetual world-war funding levels. Not that I was expecting Olympia Snowe to bring that up.