Tuesday, March 13, 2007

The Immorality Of It All



General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks that homosexuality is immoral:

"I do not believe that the armed forces of the United States are well served by saying, through our policies, that it's okay to be immoral in any way, not just with regards homosexuality. So from that standpoint, saying that gays should serve openly in the military to me says that we, by policy, would be condoning what I believe is immoral activity. And therefore, as an individual, I would not want that to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with someone else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not — we prosecute that kind of immoral behavior between members of the armed forces."

And what about people having affairs with each other who are not married? Does the military prosecute those, too? Because that might be what most homosexual relationships would look like if the partners in them are unmarried.

General Pace will not apologize for his comments.

Let's look at one part of his statement in a little bit more detail:

I do not believe that the armed forces of the United States are well served by saying, through our policies, that it's okay to be immoral in any way

What if a war in itself is immoral?

What if a war that in itself might be immoral causes the U.S. military to take psychopaths to Iraq (or makes some people into psychopaths) and what if these psychopaths then rape and murder a fourteen-year old girl and slaughter her whole family?

Is it immoral to force wounded soldiers back to Iraq even if their disabilities make them useless over there? Is it immoral to ignore the crisis in the medical care the returning veterans get until one is caught?

The conservative concept of morality is almost always a narrow one, having to do with sexuality. But even if we limit ourselves to looking at sexual violence in the military I see much greater problems of immorality among heterosexuals.