Mollycoddling The Military
On the floor of the United States Senate today, prior to a cloture vote to end debate on the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law prohibiting gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, Senator John McCain had some things to say on the matter.
Today is a very sad day. The Commandant of the United States Marine Corps says when your life hangs on the line, you don’t want anything distracting it. Mistakes or inattention or distraction cost Marines lives. I don’t want to permit that opportunity to happen and I’ll tell you why. You go up to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Marines are up there with no legs. None. You’ve got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs.
The reference is to the recent remarks of General James F. Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, who has publicly opposed repeal.
“Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines lives,” he said on Tuesday, explaining how he came to his decision. “That’s the currency of this fight.
“I don’t want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda [National Naval Medical Center, in Maryland] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction.”
…
[W]ith so many Marines engaged in Afghanistan, he thought about what could happen to small units like those in Sangin, where fighting is the heaviest by many accounts. When a firefight breaks out, he said, lives depend on “intuitive behavior” free from distraction.
“I don’t want to permit that opportunity [for distraction] to happen,” he said.
It’s important to parse what General Amos and Senator McCain are saying, because quite clearly they themselves haven’t.
Amos and McCain, when talking about “distractions” and “intuitive behavior”, in essence are saying that the soldiers of the United States military are too stupid, immature, or outright homophobic to do their jobs properly if there are gays in their midst.
Their position, when parsed, is that if there are known gays around, we can’t trust what politicians and military leaders keep telling us is the best-trained fighting force in the history of the world to be intelligent and focused enough to do what we’ve spent billions of dollars training them to do when the bullets fly and the bombs fall.
James Amos, the head of the United States Marine Corps, and John McCain, a leading Senator and himself a veteran, argue that the soldiers for whom they claim to speak are simply too weak, or at least too weak-minded, and that the nation’s policies need to respect this failing.
Fortunately for the rest of us, today sixty-five of McCain’s fellow Senators disagreed with his and Amos’ assessment that U.S. soliders are too stupid, immature, or outright homophobic to live in the 21st century.