Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash
I read with interest and incredulity Father Alexander F.C. Webster’s article published in Stars & Stripes on 24 August (Chaplains in no-win situation on ‘don’t ask.”) Father Webster asked me to read the article and tell him what I think. This is what I think.
Father Webster begins by asking the reader to believe that rescinding the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy will “shred the social and moral fabric of our armed forces.” I find it startling that anyone could possibly believe that the social and moral fabric of the United States armed forces is so fragile that it teeters on a policy that is rooted in dishonesty — a policy that requires tens of thousands of people to lie every day of their lives about who they are and what they are so that they don’t lose their livelihood and so they can continue to serve their country. It seems to me to be a rather perverse morality that postulates that dishonesty, not honesty, is the best policy. This is the first time I have ever heard of a morality based on dishonesty.
After this opening salvo, Father Webster takes the reader on a flight of hysteria that ends with the promise that there will be “no compromise” with the homosexuals and that the “battle lines” against them are “clearly drawn” and that an army is in the field to ensure that they are in the closet. Along the way we stop, as one would expect, in the open bay showers and we hear the usual references to the “’gay’ lifestyle” and “ideological indoctrination” and “social engineering,” terms which are never defined or explained but which are supposed to scare the hell out of us.
In the midst of the hysteria, Father Webster does raise issues which warrant serious consideration. Before considering them, however, allow me to say a few things about myself and why I have chosen to respond to Father Webster’s article.
I am not and have never been a member of the armed forces, but I have had the good fortune to teach military students and their dependants on military bases in Asia for the last 20 years. It has been one of the greatest experiences of my life.
I am an agnostic. I don’t know if there is a god. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know. I can’t remember where I put my keys half the time, so to say definitively that there is or isn’t a god is simply beyond me. I just don’t know. And —– oh, yeah — no, I’m not gay.
Having said that, it should be clear that I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Whether or not DADT is appealed won’t have much of an effect on me personally. But then, it won’t have much of an effect on Father Webster either since he waited until a month after he retired to publish something that could have gotten him into trouble if he were on active duty. I guess he faced the sort of dilemma that a gay military member faces every day, and that is how he chose to deal with it. In any event, my reason to respond to Father Webster’s article is not political or ideological. It is more simple that: bigotry pisses me off.
Bigotry is a strong and ugly word, and Father Webster might object to my use of it here. But Noah Webster wouldn’t. Webster’s Dictionary defines a bigot as “a person obstinately or intolerably devoted to his or her own opinions or prejudices; especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.” Unlike Father Webster, I believe in defining important terms in an argument if there is a chance they can be misconstrued. We all know what dishonesty is. And now the reader knows what my working definition of bigotry is; it’s the one in the dictionary.
The most dispassionate synopsis that I can give of the issues that Father Webster raises is that repealing DADT will present a moral dilemma to chaplains “similar to that which the earliest Christians faced in the pagan Roman Empire: whether to obey God or men.” He claims that some chaplains (we don’t know how many) for reasons of faith will not be able to perform their ministry and may be denied their right of free speech, apparently because they would not be able to speak out against homosexuality. As a result, for reasons of conscience, chaplains who feel this way may resign from the armed forces.
The dilemma between serving God or men, as I understand it, centers on the fact, which Father Webster never actually states, that chaplains, like all service members, take an oath to the Constitution, not to the Bible or to some interpretation of the Bible. If DADT is repealed and homosexuals are entitled to the constitutional protections that every other American is entitled to, then chaplains who find homosexuals morally repugnant and therefore cannot tolerate them will either have to learn to tolerate them or resign from the armed forces so that they don’t violate their oath to the Constitution by discriminating against homosexuals in some way. In other words, if DADT is repealed and thousands of active duty homosexuals are no longer outlaws, then some unspecified number of chaplains may be tempted to break the law.
Although Father Webster doesn’t tell us how many chaplains may find themselves in this situation, we do know (although he doesn’t mention this either) that the number of service members who have been forced out of the armed forces because of DADT now stands at over 15,000, including 59 Arabic linguists and 9 Farsi linguists.
Far be it from me to be so presumptuous as to assert what people or what type of occupational field — chaplains or linguists or any other — are of greater value to the military. And far be it from me to ask other people to make such an assertion. But that is precisely what Father Webster is asking us to do. What’s it going to be — a bunch of gay people or some people who can’t tolerate them? We are being asked to choose between sacrificing the pursuit of happiness for the many to accommodate the intolerance of the few. Since that is the choice he is asking us to make, I will comply. I choose the many. If some chaplains decide that they cannot serve service members because they cannot abide or tolerate homosexuals, then they can follow their conscience and resign if that’s what they want to do. That’s their choice.
The issue that Father Webster raises about chaplains losing their right to voice dissenting opinions is a serious and troubling one. Somewhere in the midst of his hysteria, he does have a point. The right to free speech should apply to everyone, including those people whom Justice William O. Douglas once referred to as “the miserable merchants of miscreant ideas.” Everyone! Intolerance and bigotry are not crimes. They are ugly, but they are not crimes. No chaplain or anyone else should be denied the right of expression.
I don’t know, or pretend to know, how this issue of freedom of expression as it relates to the repeal of DADT will play out. I don’t know how the repeal of DADT in general will play out. I don’t think any of us do.
What I do know is that the issue of the repeal of DADT is being studied by a presidential commission which will decide what the new policy will be. Yes, I know! A presidential commission! I rolled my eyes too when I heard about it. One thing I think we can reasonably expect from the commission, however, is that it will treat the issue in its entirety and more objectively than Father Webster has. It will no doubt study the privacy issues such as open bay showers that Father Webster has worked himself up into such a lather over. It will, I suspect, study how a non discriminatory policy toward gay people is conducted in other militaries, such as 22 of our NATO allies who allow gays to serve openly, another fact Father Webster fails to mention.
Father Webster’s comments, sadly, belie a lack of faith in the ability of our country’s civilian and military leadership and in the enlisted personnel of the American armed forces to find a solution to this problem. I do not share this lack of faith, just as I do not share his view that the military’s moral fabric is so thin that it will be shredded by allowing gay people to be themselves.
The history of America’s military is a history of adaptability and problem solving. Over the last 62 years the American armed forces have been racially desegregated, have gone from a draft-based military to an all volunteer force, and have fully integrated women into its ranks.
In my 20 years of experience working with military members I’ve learned that they, like the military they serve in, are very adaptable. I’ve also learned that they are very resourceful too when that is what the situation requires. They get the job done. They accomplish the mission, and they don’t need to rely on the sort of histrionics that Father Webster relies on.
One of the things that is so disturbing about Father Webster’s letter is not simply his insulting militant intolerance towards gay military people — a group of people, by the way, who cannot defend themselves by expressing a dissenting opinion since they are not retired yet — but his assumption that this sort of bigotry would have popular appeal among military people. To be sure, there are bigots in the military just as there are bigots everywhere. But my experience with military members is that the vast majority are better than that. Plain and simple — they are better than that.
The adaptability and resourcefulness we see in the history of the American military are qualities we see throughout the history of America. Americans are problem solvers. We strive to improve. After all, “we the people” wrote the Constitution of the United States “in order to form a more perfect union.”
Of the 17 amendments that have been added to the Constitution of the United States since 1791 when the Bill of Rights was added, six have been designed to extend more freedom and liberties to more people. Each of those six amendments was our way of saying “Something is wrong here. We need to change this. We are better than this.”
This commitment to forming a more perfect union is evident in all areas of our history, not just in the Constitution itself. It is part of our cultural essence. It’s been shouted loudly from canons on battlefields (real battlefields, not the kind Father Webster is talking about), and it’s been chosen quietly in voting booths, and it’s been written in boldface on signs carried by protesters on streets, and it’s been muttered in living rooms across America by people sitting alone watching Bull Connor and Jim Crow on the evening news. We are better than this.
This is the message that we should be sending to our congressional representatives; rather than endorsing Father Webster’s odious ideas, we should be telling our representatives that we are better than those ideas.
In my American history classes I sometimes tell students stories that female friends have told me of the discrimination that they faced early in their careers. Some students shake their heads in disbelief, as if to say “How could that be?” It wasn’t that long ago! They have similar reactions when I give them handouts from an earlier period in American history in which people —- prominent people — routinely refer to Native Americans and colonial people as savages and heathens. They show a similar incredulity which is often accompanied by sadness or anger when I show them videos of scenes from the civil rights movement from the 1960’s. The hatred, the violence, the bigotry. It wasn’t that long ago; how could it have been?; We are better than this.
It is easy for me to imagine, and it may someday come to pass, that students in future American history classes will look back at this time and this issue and will ask “Why was this such a big deal?” “Why did this take so long?” Perhaps the teacher in that class will provide the sad answer to those important questions by handing out a copy of Father Webster’s paean to dishonesty and bigotry.
Let’s hope that that day is not in the too distant future.
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