Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  But the clearest danger to the military and their defenseless families was the threat of gay disease. Citing alarming statistics about the number of HIV cases that were caused by homosexual behavior, Knight wrote that lifting the ban “would add to the burden on medical facilities in disproportionate numbers.” Linking gays to a “higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases,” he claimed they would “compete disproportionately for services” in the military’s medical system. “Families,” he stated incredulously, “may find one of their children, suffering from chicken pox, standing in waiting room lines behind homosexuals suffering from diseases they incurred during homosexual activity.”19

  Knight’s appeal to the country’s base fears—of an army of infectious homosexuals waiting to physically and morally taint the innocent, wholesome institutions of American life—became the modus operandi of the religious right. Dozens of Christian organizations, whose influence reached literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide, combined efforts to promote their dark vision. Knight’s argument, while morally and religiously based, was linked to a social and ultimately political claim: that giving state approval to homosexuality would undermine the cultural norms that nudged people to form heterosexual families, whose consequent decline would pull down American society. “Undermining military families by placing homosexual behavior on a par with marital fidelity,” he concluded, “would provide devastating evidence that our government no longer recognizes the importance of strong families in cultivating the virtues that enable us to be a free, self-governing people.”20

  Perhaps no one was more instrumental in consolidating evangelical and military opposition to gay service than Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lee Maginnis, who would soon become Knight’s colleague at FRC. In 1990, Maginnis left a combat tour in Alaska to take a position with the U.S. Army Inspector General, where he investigated allegations of officer improprieties. The experience gave him firsthand lessons in the ethical challenges faced by military officers. Maginnis was something of an essayist, arguing to anyone who would listen about the dangers of letting women into combat positions in the military. In 1992, he began researching a series of articles to share with military leaders about the similar perils of letting gays serve in the military. He went to gay hotspots, including the Washington, D.C., gay bookstore Lambda Rising, and trolled through the pages of The Advocate to collect information to use against the movement to lift the ban.21

  Maginnis worked tirelessly to ensure that the armed forces were not tainted by homosexuality. As the military weighed how to respond to the prospect of openly gay troops, each service branch appointed a study group to examine the issue and report to senior officials. These service task forces would eventually report to a Pentagon working group that would produce a direct recommendation for the secretary of defense. Some of the service groups, like the air force group, accepted as a fait accompli that gays would be allowed to serve, since that was what the president ultimately instructed in January 1993, before backing away from the order that summer. The task for these military study groups, then, was to advise how, not whether, to make the change. But the army group set about trying to resist the order altogether, an effort that some critics regarded as insubordination. The group’s working papers, which were leaked to the press, warned that lifting the ban would “force the military to experiment with profound cultural and life-style changes not accepted by the majority of Americans,” and that it could so hurt recruitment that “the country may be forced to consider abandoning the all-volunteer force and returning to conscription.”22

  The force behind the army study group was, predictably, the religious right. According to Maginnis, all five of the group’s members were religious conservatives, himself included. Recognizing, along with other leaders of the religious right, that biblical citations might not be enough to win the battle of hearts and minds, Maginnis decided to focus on secular research for what he called “political reasons.” He knew there was widespread support for the gay ban in military circles, but he also suspected that the “moral repugnancy” of many military personnel toward homosexuality could not be the sole basis of their argument.23 Teaming up with the Family Research Council while still an active-duty officer, he coauthored a policy paper that appeared in FRC’s newsletter, and eventually made its way to both the Pentagon and the Congress.

  Yet the bulk of Maginnis’s anti-gay venom was contained in another paper he wrote around the same time, which was also entered into the Congressional Record. “The Homosexual Subculture” was a six-part profile of a typical homosexual, meant to combat “ignorance about homosexual practices” and “educate the Congress and the American people” so they would be more likely to support gay exclusion. Maginnis’s strategy, now time-tested by the religious right, was to make quack statistics look credible by piling up footnotes, most of which cited the same small group of discredited anti-gay researchers. The fact that more credible scholars and journalists eventually published exposés of the fake evidence rarely made its way to the countless Americans who gobbled up the initial “studies” and leaned on them to confirm their own worldview.24

  “The Homosexual Subculture” cast the gay community as permanent rebels who scoffed at authority and could never conform to society. Gays use their “raw political power” to make a string of demands including “laws to prohibit discrimination,” pro-gay sex education, the “decriminalization of private sex acts between consenting ‘persons,’ ” and acceptance of military service. This agenda, wrote Maginnis, amounted to a “homosexual assault.” In his counterassault, he launched into a tirade about the homosexual’s destructive sexual and health practices. His obsessive attention to detail makes Ken Starr’s later report on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky look like Romantic poetry. According to Maginnis, studies showed that gay people “typically live a dangerously promiscuous lifestyle”: 43 percent had over five hundred sexual partners and 28 percent had over a thousand. “Some of their favorite places are ‘gay’ bars, ‘gay’ theaters and bathhouses.” The quotations around “gay” seemed to imply that the whole torrid affair was anything but happy and festive.25

  Maginnis described in graphic detail what the typical homosexual allegedly did in bathhouses, right down to the clothes-checking procedures. According to “medical literature,” these environments were “contaminated with fecal droppings because many homosexuals can’t control themselves due to a condition called ‘gay bowel syndrome.’ They’ve exhausted their anal sphincter muscles by repeated (93 percent) acts of sodomy, thus becoming incontinent.” Many gays, wrote Maginnis, enjoyed fisting, which he also described in minute detail, as well as rimming, fellatio, scat, and golden showers. Their frequent sadomasochistic practices included the use of “Nazi like insignia and the use of whips” and gays “often model their actions after the Nazi party.”26

  Maginnis insisted that these practices were “commonplace” and were documented in “authoritative scientific journals.” In other sections of the six-part profile, Maginnis explained the gay penchant for reproducing themselves through recruitment, including the common seduction of vulnerable teens “still developing their sexual identity.” Gays were eighteen times more likely to have sex with minors, often when teachers molested their students. Three-quarters of gays had sex with underage boys. In all this, protested Maginnis, the national media was maddeningly complicit, casting homosexual lifestyles as simply “different,” rather than “wrong.” He lamented that talk shows even treated gays and lesbians as “normal people.”27

  Finally, Maginnis indicted the mental health of gays and lesbians. “Homosexuals are a very unstable group,” he wrote, whose lifestyle “breeds enormous amounts of guilt” over their promiscuity, dishonesty, and failed relationships. “They are restless in their contacts, lonely, jealous, and neurotic depressive,” concluded the amateur psychiatrist. “As a category of people, homosexuals have a greater indiscipline problem than heterosexuals,” he stated, citing as evidence for
this “indiscipline”—for reasons that are unclear—a greater likelihood of being murdered.28

  Maginnis’s research was chock full of footnotes, an effort to present his preconceived notions of homosexual danger and immorality as sound social science. But his “research” was profoundly dishonest. It relied on the unfounded assertions of extremists in both the pro- and anti-gay camps. These “sources” ran the gamut from gay radicals writing intentionally provocative treatises like “Rimming as Revolutionary Act” to discredited homophobic researchers who made grandiose conclusions based on miniscule, skewed, and uncontrolled sample pools. In other words, Maginnis relied on research practices that even eighth-grade science students learn never, ever to engage in.

  The most notorious of these sources was Paul Cameron, who in 1983 had been expelled from the American Psychological Association; condemned by the American Sociological Association for ethical violations, including misrepresenting social science research; and slammed by courts for being unprofessional in previous testimony. And it’s no wonder. One of Cameron’s studies yielded conclusions about homosexuals based exclusively on interviews with serial killers. Another concluded that lesbians were inclined to purposely infect their partners with sexually transmitted diseases. It was based on a sample of seven. Cameron famously declared that gay men in the United States would live to an average age of forty-three. This theory was derived from perusing random obituaries of gay neighborhood newspapers as the AIDS epidemic peaked. These obituary pages were hardly a representative sampling of all deaths of gay American men.29

  Cameron was the chief source for Maginnis’s anti-gay “statistics.” Another source was Judith Reisman of the Institute for Media Education. Reisman studied classified ads in The Advocate and compared them to mainstream and ethnic magazines, concluding that only gays sought to entrap underage boys, engage in prostitution, and solicit violence. Arguing preposterously that the Advocate classified ads reflected “prevailing” gay norms, she claimed that “the evidence reveals a repeated pattern from 1972 to 1991 of man-boy sex and ‘boy lovers’ as a prevailing cultural homosexual/Advocate value.” Her work was quoted by Concerned Women for America (with a “warning” saying its report made “occasional reference to repulsive homosexual sex acts” that were “necessary to accurately convey the nature of ‘gay’ behavior-conduct”), as well as the Family Research Council and numerous other conservative Christian organizations. Eventually they also found their way onto the congressional floor, when allied officers or lawmakers entered them into the record.30

  Maginnis’s strategy was to paint gays and lesbians as, by definition, selfish and indulgent, unable to be virtuous participants in American society, and thus the perfect foil to his military culture of selfless service. “National security demands that individual notions and desires always be subordinate to military readiness and cohesion,” he insisted. American society, he believed, was becoming increasingly weak, selfish, and centered around individual desire, and he saw the military as a bastion of traditional values that was the last hope for keeping such indulgent individualism at bay. “Soldiers,” insisted Maginnis, “are expected to adhere to unforgiving organizational values and behaviors. Instead of embracing military culture, 200 years of military experience has found that homosexuals want to subject the military’s best interests to their lifestyle choices. That’s why the military has long held to the principal statement that ‘Homosexuality is incompatible with military service.’ ” For Maginnis, the military is “not a job, but a way of life,” marked by “little individuality” and great “self sacrifice.” But this way of life was not for everyone. The “rough-and-tumble, predominantly male military,” Maginnis wrote, “is neither for shrinking violets nor for homosexuals.” On television he repeated that the military “is about selfless service,” which is why “homosexuality and the military are incompatible.” The implication is that homosexuals cannot engage in selfless service, but can only indulge in their own desires. And ultimately, this selfishness would have disastrous consequences. If the United States continued to lose the selfless service ethic that was the foundation of military service and thus the defense of the nation, the result would be “a chain reaction that, ultimately, threatens our national security.” Thus, for Maginnis, “Our moral strength is directly related to our combat strength.”31

  What Maginnis seemed to care most about was safeguarding the symbolic space of military culture as a bastion of traditional male values. The real reason he opposed gays in the military was because it allowed traditionalists to carve out a fantasy realm of undisturbed masculinity, a realm in which idealized male virtues could be preserved and could exert their strengthening influence on the wider culture. As he said in 2002, quoting James Dobson of Focus on the Family, “Nations that are populated largely by immature, immoral, weak-willed, cowardly, and self-indulgent men cannot and will not long endure.” Somehow, a gay-free military was essential to stop this dangerous turn in American culture. Never mind the abundant instances of straight male vices—from the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to waterboarding, Tailhook, and legacies of prostitution and drug abuse that have long characterized the real military. If Maginnis actually cared about the military’s strength and virtue, he would have howled when each of these incidents occurred. Instead, he fixated on the gay menace. And in homosexuality, the religious right found a perfect bogeyman against which to cast themselves as normal and virtuous—the only Americans capable of defending the nation against threats both moral and military.

  In addition to Maginnis, the army study group included Major Melissa Wells-Petry, a fellow evangelist and active-duty lawyer in the U.S. Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) who worked closely with Maginnis to disseminate anti-gay literature under the guise of legitimate social science. With Wells-Petry on board, the study group had easy access to military legal records and convinced the JAG office to conduct an army study of courts-martial for homosexual misconduct. The study concluded that the sex crime rate of gay service members was higher than the army’s overall crime rate. The study was so biased—it never even bothered to look at rates of heterosexual misconduct, giving it no basis to compare sex crimes of gays and straights—that the army launched an investigation into the release of the data, and in April 1993 Wells-Petry was hauled into the office of the secretary of defense for a scolding. But it didn’t stop Wells-Petry from taking time out of her busy work schedule to criss-cross the country opposing gay service—all as part of a publicity campaign to sell her book Exclusion: Homosexuals and the Right to Serve, which came out that same year.32

  In the book, which was sent around to as many members of Congress and the military leadership as would accept their free copy, Wells-Petry argued that it was not anti-gay to discriminate against gay people, any more than it was “anti-overweight people” to bar those who were too heavy for military service. For Wells-Petry, it was simply a question of who could do the job.33 Never mind that in the case of gays and lesbians, no serious critic had claimed they couldn’t do the job. Rather, gays were banned because straights allegedly could not do the job when gays were present.

  For Wells-Petry, it was also proper to ban gays because other countries where service members might be stationed, such as Saudi Arabia, were intolerant of homosexuality. Some even executed people simply for being gay (and many would never allow someone like Wells-Petry—a woman—to don a military uniform). Such deference to medieval attitudes toward sexual freedom, she maintained, is not “countenancing prejudice. It is using common sense to compose a fighting force that can operate anywhere in the world without provoking unnecessary social controversy or opposition.”34 It was a remark that looks painfully hollow and naïve in the years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which many observers regard as a far more serious instance of American service members “provoking unnecessary social controversy” in a foreign nation.

  Despite claims that her opposition to gay service was rooted in military necessity and genuine merit
ocracy rather than prejudice, Exclusion was full of moral condemnations against gays, and even defenses for why such animus was appropriate. Resorting to all the tired stereotypes that her evangelical colleagues deployed, Wells-Petry cited studies saying gays were promiscuous (one found that the mean number of lifetime sexual partners among gay men was 1,422, and some had up to 7,000), raised health-care costs because of risky behavior that caused illness, and were unduly privileged and therefore did not need special “protection”—never mind that lifting the ban would not create special protection, but merely end unequal treatment. But Wells-Petry was also unabashed in citing a moral basis for the ban. “The homosexual exclusion policy has a moral dimension,” she wrote. “It is important to recognize that morality is not the law’s poor cousin,” but rather a legitimate foundation for law and national policy. She even cited the notorious 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case, in which the Supreme Court upheld laws banning sodomy. That decision had said the law is “constantly based on notions of morality,” and rightly so—if laws representing “moral choices” were unconstitutional, said the Court, “the courts will be very busy indeed.” Bowers was reversed in 2003, when Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that imposing “moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate governmental interest” under the Constitution and that any law rooted in moral opposition “raises the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected.” Indeed, wrote O’Connor, “We have never held that moral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest, is a sufficient rationale under the Equal Protection Clause to justify a law that discriminates among groups of persons.”35

  Though Wells-Petry’s legal manifesto looked more thoughtful and professional than some of the sloppier screeds of her peers, nowhere did it make the case for why the damning (and intellectually dishonest) statistics she cited about homosexuals meant they must stay out of the military. In fact, her position was that defending the gay ban did not require empirical evidence, proof, or research, so long as it jibed with the commonsense assumptions of enough people. “Based on the reasonableness of . . . assumptions, presumptions, and commonsense propositions—though not proof proper,” she concluded, laws have been upheld by the Supreme Court as having “obvious” justification. Thus the gay ban “clearly does not require proof of the factual merits” of the military’s judgment.36