Audio By Carbonatix
Conservative columnist and over-syndicated radio blowhard Cal Thomas doesn’t live around here, so he may not have seen our summary dismemberment of the suddenly fashionable “chaplain’s argument” against the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell. But there he is, on the opinion page of our once-respectable daily, the Sun Sentinel, acting like it means something. So let’s go over it again — this time, in detail.
As explicated by Thomas, the “chaplain’s argument” goes like this: “Will chaplains be disciplined if they counsel someone who is gay that they can change and be forgiven, just as heterosexuals who engage in sex outside of marriage can also repent and discover a new path? This proposed change in the law has a more ‘fundamentalist’ tone than fundamentalism. Submit, or else.”
It would take a moving company to unpack all of the assumptions
in those few sentences. Notably, that the right to proselytize is
somehow threatened by the repeal of don’t ask,
don’t tell. Or that, if it is, then the
right to proselytize on the job somehow trumps a service member’s right
to copulate with whom and what he pleases in his spare time. But I am
primarily concerned with the even-nuttier assumption that the armed
forces have never, until this moment, considered enlisting soldiers who
have committed so grievous a sin as gay sex against the sodomy-obsessed,
vengeful god of the Protestants. Which is wrong. Our armed forces are bursting
with sinners, and they haven’t harmed the chaplaincy one bit. (As
to the damage done by the chaplaincy against the armed forces? That’s another,
much sadder story.)
A
large majority of the armed forces are Protestant. There is a large
Catholic contingent as well. Jews are scarce, and Muslims are scarcer.
The chaplaincy reflects this. There wasn’t a Muslim chaplain in the
American armed forces until 1993, and the Air Force didn’t get its first
until earlier this decade.
The overwhelming majority of the
armed forces’ chaplaincy is comprised of Protestant Christians, the
majority of whom are Baptist. Doctrinaire Christians of most Protestant
denominations, Baptists included, believe that everyone but they and
their co-believers are going to hell, where they shall spend eternity
in a lake of fire. They believe this, and preach it, even though a whopping 20
percent
of armed forces consists of self-identified nonbelievers. Which
means that by the standards of Christian dogma, a full one-fifth of the
armed forces is comprised of men and woman whose very existence
constitutes a far greater sin than sodomy. And the chaplaincy gets along
just fine.
Though they proselytize. I spoke to one pro-atheism
activist and Air Force veteran of several decades — United States Air
Force Academy, class of ’69 — who was raised in a “relatively mild”
Methodist church. “Imagine my shock at the United States Air Force
Academy,” he said, “age 18 and vulnerable as shit, when I came up
against a Baptist preacher who knew that if he did not save my soul, and
the soul of every other cadet in what was then mandatory chapel, we
were all damned.”
The situation has not changed appreciably, least
of all at the USAF.
There, evangelicals are cocks of the walk, proselytizing with impunity
and bullying those who fail to accept Jesus Christ as their personal
lord and savior. We must assume that the defenders of the chaplaincy
believe the relatively small number of gay service members who will come
out of the closet after don’t ask, don’t tell’s repeal pose a greater
danger to our
uniformed clerics’ freedom of religion than the several hundred thousand
enlisted heathens already tolerating the chaplains’ unwelcome
ministrations. These homosexuals must be mighty warriors indeed.
