America’s Giant Pratfall

When I was a child, I thought that living through a degenerate period would be great fun – one big party. Guns blazing, fast cars, beautiful girls, plenty of adult beverages – at least that was my idea of it from having watched movies about the Roaring Twenties with James Cagney. Now, as an aging adult, I really am living through such an era, and it’s not fun at all. In fact, it’s depressing.

However, I do take solace in my role as a cultural pathologist. It can be amusing to observe the level of absurdity to which things go when moral principles have been reversed. The logic is usually impeccable and the consequences inexorable. Only the results are insane.

Take a good look at the poster [pictured on right]. It is not a parody. How did we get to the pink Pentagon? It is the product of the reversed judgment on the morality of homosexual acts. If sodomy is the moral equivalent of the marital act, then those who base their lives on it must not only be welcomed, but celebrated, and in some way compensated for past discrimination. When I was working at the Voice of America back in the 1990s, there were already such posters in the lobby of our building during Gay Pride Month. It was only a matter of time before the march through the institutions reached the Pentagon.

The celebration of “rich diversity,” however, is not diverse enough to include those who have not shared in the moral reversal – that would include the observant followers of every major religion. Those religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, hold that homosexual acts are morally repugnant. Therefore, their teachings must be privatized, while homosexuality is publicized and celebrated. Of course we can’t blame the poor homosexuals for all of this. First came the embrace of divorce and contraception. Once sex was divorced from procreation, the rest became more or less inevitable. If serial polygamy is okay, and contraceptive sex is okay, what could be wrong with a little sodomy? I only wish there were survivors from the 1930 Lambeth Conference, which first endorsed a limited use of contraceptives, who might be forced to attend the Gay Pride event at the Pentagon, so they can dwell upon what it hath wrought. Just as there’s no such thing as being a little bit pregnant, there is no such thing as a little compromise on moral principle.

Here is how President Barack Obama did it. Let’s recall his May 9th statement endorsing homosexual marriage:

“When I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

First, Obama forced the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell on the reluctant military, and then used that very same military as the excuse for endorsing homosexual marriage, as if it were the military asking for it. Those poor Marines in the foxholes of Afghanistan were just aching to marry each other, and Obama comes to their rescue.

This is completely risible, but one has to admire the audacity of his transparently sophistical argument. What’s more, it’s working. Obama is pulling everyone along with him.

Take, for instance, the Secretary of Defense, Leon E. Panetta, a fine graduate of the Jesuit Santa Clara University, who is hosting the first ever Pride event at the Pentagon “to personally thank all our gay and lesbian service members, LGBT DoD civilians, and their families for their service to our country,” as he says on a Pentagon video. Panetta, a Catholic, attended both Santa Clara University undergraduate and the law schools. On the Santa Clara web site, Panetta says, “In politics there has to be a line beyond which you don’t go—the line that marks the difference between right and wrong, what your conscience tells you is right. Too often people don’t know where the line is. My family, how I was raised, my education at SCU, all reinforced my being able to see that line.”

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Robert Reilly has worked in foreign policy, the military, and the arts. His most recent book is The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. This article courtesy of MercatorNet.

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