The latest bombshell connected to the lewdness of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” welcoming homosexuals with open arms (no suggestiveness intended) into the military concerns the skipper of the USS Enterprise, a U.S. Navy state-of-the-art aircraft carrier. Captain Owen Honors, when he was the ship’s executive officer (second-in-command) a few years ago, hosted a lurid closed-circuit ship-wide TV presentation featuring himself, among others, participating in sexually oriented episodes that even included (gasp) unflattering allusions to…yep…homosexuals.
This probably would have raised no eyebrows except for those allusions (common in even the smallest military units) and, of course, the fact that women are assigned to ships of the line…so, there’s probably been some gender-harassment of some kind included, especially since women apparently in the shower were a part of the production, as were men in the shower. The video has been made public and is on the Internet, maybe even without the editing that at least some of the media employ or will employ.
The top field-commanders made it clear to the Senators that they wanted no part of the repeal but the democrats own the Congress, notwithstanding that some repubs helped pass the repeal. This is “enlightenment time” for the progressives, as exhibited the other day on ABC’s Good Morning America, when Vice President Biden made it plain that same-sex marriage as an official national phenomenon is virtually inevitable, even though President Obama hasn’t made up his mind about that and most states either legislatively or constitutionally or both, not to mention the U.S. government in the 1998 Marriage Act, ban it.
The same-sex marriage-thing will be moot for at least the next two years since the republicans own the House and have cloture control of the Senate. Obama, however, is hot-to-trot by issuing executive orders these days so there’s no telling what he might attempt in the realization that Congress would kill him in this matter, Biden’s wisdom, qualified and quantified by jobs-as-a-three-letter-word, notwithstanding.
The DADT matter is yet another imposition on the military in the interest of social engineering, never mind that the military is the farthest thing from a democracy, the obeying of orders being the operative tool, not who is or is not offended, favored, dis-favored, or anything else. The example of the captain and his subordinates regarding their attitude toward homosexuals is instructive. The homosexuals may be legal but they will not be welcomed; indeed, they could even be in danger. The Big E is about to be deployed but Captain Honors will not command since top-down condemnation of homosexuals will surely make the LGBT outfit into a pressure-cooker for him to be well-done.
This is not the first time the military has been used as a sociological guinea pig. During the Carter administration (another democrat president) in 1977, gender-integrated boot camps came on line as a socializing project and so wrecked the system that it was sacked in 1982 early in Reagan’s eight-year tenure. By that time, fighting men had become so flabby that they were not battlefield-ready.
Boot camp integration came back during the Clinton years in the 90s (administrative orders) for nearly all of the services but the Marines, who would have no part of it. In 2002 after an extensive study, this monstrosity was soundly thrashed. Just plain common sense would have militated against throwing hormone-driven young people intimately together, not to mention the inequities in physical strength and endurance and the inordinate softening of rigid requirements consequent to making the rigors possible for women.
The “Tail-hook Scandal” of 1991 comes to mind when men and women officers of the Navy got together for the annual non-duty drunken orgy. Later in 1992, one of the women tearfully cried “Rape,” although probably few if any seriously considered it so. Result: Thirty-nine male officers were punished. The ladies got off. Not long after, the Navy determined to make up for it by ordering the qualification of two women as carrier pilots. The first one died attempting to land on a carrier and the second was washed out as unable to handle an F-14, thus engendering all sorts of accusations, studies, etc. The accounts of other shipboard behavior of gender-integrated sailors are lurid and plenteous.
Women have to be evacuated from ships by the time of their twentieth week of pregnancy or sooner, assuming that ships on patrol are always in combat mode (Dept. of the Navy, June 2007). In any case, has anyone ever heard of a maternity ward and day-care on a ship? And then there’s postpartum time, with all the reassigning of doable duties and down time simply to be expected with regard to the whole matter.
Captain Honors was wrong, notwithstanding his outstanding duty achievements. His commander at the time was also wrong in allowing Honors’ shenanigans, assuming he knew about them ahead of time. If he didn’t, he shouldn’t have been in command. It’s doubtful that Honors would have pulled this garbage without permission, understanding in his rank, time, and place the chain-of-command requirements.
At bottom, though, is the insane social tinkering by silly presidents and Congress-people, most of whom, it seems, wouldn’t know a salute from an obscene gesture, that goes on with the fighting forces that are trained to break things and kill people, not latch on to the “can’t we all just get along” tripe purveyed by the political correctness crowd.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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