OTHER PEOPLE HAVE RIGHTS, TOO

Starting with the right to be defended from all enemies, both foreign and domesticated.

The Commander-in-Chief was firm, forceful and decisive: “I will end ‘don’t ask-don’t tell’!”

The Good News: Obama finally decides on a plan for Afghanistan.
The Bad News: It’s “Send Nathan Lane!”

This is a guy who can sit in a briefing and hear the phrase “The Biden Plan” without breaking out in peals of convulsive laughter.

Joe Biden:

“Hey, everybody; let’s divide Afghanistan into three parts! I didn’t get to use my plan in Iraq–but it’s still a good plan!”

The president says Iraq “must be ended”, not “won”.
He’s cutting missile defense while crazies are building missiles.
He’s banned the new F-22 outright.
He can’t be bothered or even hurried to formulate an Afghanistan policy even though he has called it an absolute must-win war. But that was last week.

But one thing he knows without a doubt is that he wants to conduct social engineering, using soldiers as guinea penguins.

James Bowman takes a non-phobic look (a phobia being an “irrational fear”–but he reaches his conclusions both fearlessly and rationally):

Actually, there is no “Don’t ask, don’t tell” law [only an Exec. Order-ed.]. The law passed by [a Democrat] Congress in 1993 (USC Section 654, Title 10) says, “The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.” [...] Yes, President Clinton was prepared to agree, homosexual acts might be a risk to the high standards of morale, good order, discipline, and unit cohesion, but if nobody knew about them, then what harm could they do? Since then, nobody has thought up a better way of coping with this thorny problem. The left has nothing better to offer than riding roughshod over the opinions of the majority of servicemen…

The advocates…often cite the example of Israel or Britain…In Britain, the change came about in response to an order from the European Court of Human Rights, whose decrees have the force of law. For this reason, it would not be in the interest of any officer who valued his career prospects to remark upon any problems that the presence of gay soldiers, sailors, or airmen might be causing in their armed forces. Nor has the performance of the British Army in Iraq or the Royal Navy in the Persian Gulf been such as to render all suspicion of damage to morale, good order, and discipline ridiculous.

In other words, it couldn’t even be evaluated because all opposition was criminalized. And that’s just one of many problems.

Advocates say it is analogous to race, but they haven’t convinced black people of that. Nor is it perfectly comparable to gender integration, which has its own unresolved and unresolvable problems. In fact, these issues are as deep and morally-felt as any human beings face. Some things just aren’t susceptible to morality-impositions by shallow leftist screeds and diktats.

Just leave it alone. Our troops aren’t going to melt because they see a gay person. But once this gets into the Militant Grievance Group Rights Extortion Racket, defending America moves far to the back of the bus. Or even under the bus.

Maybe the president does have a plan after all.