As I noted in a recent post, the Defense Department’s own studies demonstrate conclusively that no good reason exists to prohibit openly lesbian/gay persons from serving in the U.S. military. Only after multiple demands did openly gay former member of the House of Representatives Gerry Studds manage to extract from the Defense Department its reports on the topic, which one of Studds’ aides published as a book called Gays in the Military. The Defense Department, as Studds makes clear in his preface to the book, really didn’t want those reports to become public. I failed in my earlier post to note that all of our major allies allow openly lesbian/gay soldiers with no problem.
Why, then, has all this empirical evidence had so little effect on the debate in the United States over allowing lesbian/gay soldiers to serve openly? I think it’s partly the Puritan hangover, and partly the continuing utility of sex and sexuality for keeping ordinary people in line. I think we tend to forget sometimes that the first successful European settlers in North America were Puritans, and that their belief system is in some ways deeply embedded in our culture in a way that is very difficult to dislodge. The Puritans had no problem with sex per se. They just wanted to contain it entirely within marriage.
Sound familiar? One could write a post very similar to this one about how no valid empirical reason exists to prohibit same-sex marriage. How exactly will same-sex marriage impair anyone’s opposite-sex marriage? If your opposite-sex marriage is so fragile that you have to worry about your spouse taking off to marry someone of the same sex just because it becomes legal, then your marriage is in sad shape.
It’s something about sex. White supremacy in the United States is also all about sex. The excuse for lynchings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was usually the allegation that said black man had made some sort of sexual advance to a white woman. To this day, even our updated version of slavery, the grossly disproportionate incarceration of African American men, reflects our culture’s fear of black men, which is ultimately grounded in fantasies of their superior sexual prowess. Similar stereotypes exist about black women, but in our culture – although not in all cultures – we cast women’s sexuality as less threatening than men’s, so we don’t need to imprison black women as we do black men.
I am certainly not original in observing that people’s existing belief systems can have a huge impact on how they process incoming evidence. Or, in this case, fail to process incoming evidence. Anything having to do with sex seems to throw an impermeable membrane over the brains of conservatives. This is why they continue to demand "abstinence-only sex ‘education’," which every study ever done demonstrates just doesn’t work . These people also probably oppose masturbation. What did they do when they were horny teenagers? I jacked off a lot, but I’m not a conservative, and except when I was house-sitting, that is, sleeping on other people’s sheets, my mother never said one word to me about my masturbation habit.
He never comes right out and says it, but this is the underlying message of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: the whole notion that humans have something called "sexuality" is nothing but a mechanism for social control. Look at the Catholic Church – all about controlling sexuality as a means of controlling the flock.
The situation does seem to be improving. The evidence strongly suggests that persons who know a lesbian or gay man personally are far more likely to support lesbian/gay civil rights claims, presumably because it’s hard to ignore the up-close-and-personal evidence that lesbians and gay men are not hopelessly irresponsible sex maniacs.
We will win this battle eventually. The only question is how many more individual soldiers’ careers will be ruined, and how many more soldiers with skills the military badly needs will be discharged before military leaders finally pull their heads out and think intelligently about the issue?