It’s front-page news: Seventy-five percent of Americans want gays and lesbians in the military ("Poll: 75% support gays serving openly," article, Feb. 13).
Or do they?
While apparently confused about what gays and lesbians are, we can be certain everyone knows what a homosexual is, and. on that point, the same survey respondents have a decidedly different opinion. In fact, it turns out that their opinion represents exactly the same percentage as in 1993.
Not a sea change after all, in spite of duplicitous wording and clever graphs by The Washington Post. The only thing the new survey proves is that those surveyed are not terribly literate.
"Openly gay" solves nothing, and comes at a time when the military has plenty of more important objectives.
It currently spends an enormous amount of time and energy regulating internal social issues such as diversity and sexual abuse. "Openly gay" will add yet another protected class to worry about.
Openly gay personnel will be able to claim persecution and sexual abuse every time they want to distract someone from a shortcoming in performance.
Anyone who can claim to be persecuted for racial, sexual or religious reasons can cry discrimination when they fail to measure up to established standards, and the standards will be lowered in response.
It is time politicians stopped using the military for social experimentation. The work of national defense is too important for such loss of focus and waste of resources. But of course, we know that the military is a nondemocratic organization that can’t object to the agenda of those who are unaffected by the consequences of their naive theories.
Given the distortion of the data already, the so-called survey by the military seems pointless. Our society is intent on replacing all objectivity with subjectivity in a never-ending pursuit of the lowest common denominator.
James WolfeContingency Operating Base Speicher, Iraq