THE INFLUENCE OF Maginnis and Wells-Petry on the debate over gay service was direct. In April 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin appointed a Pentagon task force called the Military Working Group (MWG), which drew on the study groups of the individual services and conducted its own further research. Its purpose was to provide options to reform the policy that would be consistent with Clinton’s pledge to lift the ban. The MWG consisted of a panel of six flag officers and a support staff of other Pentagon personnel, including Wells-Petry and, unofficially, Maginnis, who provided research and advice.37
In June, after just a few weeks of consultation, the MWG completed its report. It was promptly leaked to the press, some said in an effort to force Aspin’s office to embrace its approach before it was thoroughly evaluated.38 The report said that homosexuality was “incompatible with military service,” just as the 1981 Carter policy asserted. But President Clinton had directed the group to come up with a policy that would end discrimination against gays and lesbians simply because of who they were. In nominal deference to this order, the recommendations called for a policy that regarded sexual orientation as “a personal and private matter.” But the group wanted to ban people with a homosexual orientation. Since it was, they concluded, impossible to determine one’s homosexuality unless it was revealed in speech or action, they decided that, “for practical reasons,” service members would be discharged “only when their homosexuality is manifested by objective criteria—homosexual acts, homosexual statements, or homosexual marriages.”
These exact phrases would be adopted as part of the final “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy the next month. And both the Pentagon and, soon after, Congress accepted the MWG’s rationale for maintaining a ban on open gay service: “The presence in the military of individuals identified as homosexuals would have a significantly adverse effect on both unit cohesion and the readiness of the force—the key ingredients of combat effectiveness.”39
The MWG also made clear that the real basis for its opposition to openly gay service was moral. “The core values of the military profession would be seen by many to have changed fundamentally if homosexuals were allowed to serve,” the report explained. “This would undermine institutional loyalty and the moral basis for service, sacrifice, and commitment” for the bulk of straight soldiers. Although it cast its policy recommendations in terms of the need to respect the values of the rank and file, the report’s authors did little to contain their own moral opposition to homosexuals. Lifting the ban would leave the military’s image “tarnished,” said the report. “The homosexual lifestyle has been clearly documented as being unhealthy. Due to their sexual practices, active male homosexuals in the military could be expected to bring an increased incidence of sexually transmitted diseases,” including AIDS, which could create the perception of an “enemy within.”
The moral basis for the policy was undeniable. For Maginnis and fellow conservative Christians, the debate over gay service was really about something larger. It was an opportunity to protect a fundamentalist worldview they regarded as threatened by modernity. Religious crusaders like Maginnis and Wells-Petry and cultural crusaders like Moskos all had direct influence on what would soon become the military’s final policy. With their encouragement, military leaders made the case not simply that lifting the ban would be a threat to cohesion, but that it would be such a threat because the “core values” of the institution were—and should rightly remain—anti-gay. Changing this fact would require changing the culture, something these men and women were not willing to sanction.
Maginnis’s tireless work on behalf of the gay ban so solidified his relationship with the Family Research Council that, three weeks after retiring from the army, Maginnis was made a full-time FRC policy analyst and, eventually, the organization’s vice president.40 Nor did FRC policy papers, such as the ones written by Maginnis, sit on office shelves gathering dust. While it is clear that the moral imperatives of evangelical Christianity were the source of the strongest opposition to gay service, the concrete consequences that conservative Christians tried to tie to gay equality revealed their understanding that citing biblical damnation of homosexuality would not, in itself, be enough to sway their countrymen. The United States, they thought, was generally a religious and morally conservative nation. Yet they recognized that they would face objections or indifference from large segments of the population if they relied on religious injunctions alone to oppose gay rights. As a result, the religious right developed two powerful messages to deploy alongside their religious rhetoric: that gay equality represented a threat to families, and that it was equally a threat to national security. While the former was largely a creation of conservative Christians, the latter—that gay military service would undermine the armed forces and thus the security of the nation—was not their invention, but tapped into the old narrative of “homosexual incompatibility” described in Chapter 1. The contribution of the religious right was to spread that message with phenomenal efficiency and, most important, to insinuate the argument into the national debate by pressing powerful military leaders to make it their mantra.
The argument, of course, was one already shared by many military officials, some of whom were evangelicals themselves. But strategists at groups like FRC had quickly become experts at casting their reflexive disgust with homosexuality as a well-considered assessment of whether gay service would be good or bad for the military. The “military effectiveness” argument and the “homosexuality is sin” argument shared a reliance on the moral danger of homosexuality, and each gave the other the missing credibility that it lacked by itself. This marriage was, far and away, the most important factor in orchestrating the eventual defeat of the effort to lift the ban. For the religious right, it was a conscious, explicit, if not broadly advertised, campaign to give national standing to sectarian moral beliefs by enlisting the cache of military leaders whose opinions were widely respected and routinely shielded from civilian skepticism under the rubric of national security. And the connections were greased by the long-standing presence of evangelical Christians in positions of power in the armed forces.
So religious groups and the “research” wings they had erected began adding to their social and moral laments the argument that the military itself would be broken by a homosexual presence. FRC position papers noted that lifting the gay ban not only threatened to undermine families and destabilize innocent children but actually “could cost lives.” “Promiscuous, anal sex, which is practiced by the typical homosexual male, has proved to be the most efficient way to transmit” the HIV virus, wrote Knight in yet another 1992 policy paper. Military life, he continued, “is not a pristine environment. People get cut and scratched while in intimate proximity. In real battle, blood can flow freely.” Surely it was an unfair threat to place a heterosexual “in mortal fear for his life in case his homosexual comrade suffered a bleeding wound of any kind.” Knight had slipped into using gay men and HIV sufferers completely interchangeably.41 Again, the military’s AIDS screening program, instituted in 1985 for all recruits, had been uniformly considered a success.
Having declared their “revulsion toward homosexual[ity]” stemming from “an appreciation of the natural relationships between men and women,” FRC researchers tried to claim in the very same article that their actual concern was with the needs of the armed forces: “The real issue is military readiness, and whether the inclusion of active or self-avowed homosexuals would have a detrimental effect on military efficiency and fighting ability.” In a refrain they shared with conservative military leaders, Christian conservatives chose buzzwords that allowed them to fuse professed military concerns with the language of moral propriety, insisting that openly gay service “would lower morale, disrupt order and discipline and harm combat readiness.”42
The religious right was highly effective in getting its message out to the military brass and, through them, to Congress and the American public. By the 1990s, according to historian Anne Loveland,
evangelicals had become the consummate military “insiders, who had the ear of the military leadership.” Interviews she conducted in 1993 and 1994 with evangelicals inside the military suggested that high-ranking generals viewed gays in the military as, in the words of one, “the biggest moral issue in the century.” Even Colin Powell reportedly was “concerned about the moral issue” and had written a “moral argument” against gay service that was distributed to top brass. Loveland concluded that the relentless efforts of military evangelicals “surely made an impression on the military leadership” and “undoubtedly played an important role in fueling the leadership’s determination to maintain the ban.”43
But military evangelicals complained that they had been told by allies involved in the political negotiations on gay service not to express their opposition in moral terms—a source of endless frustration and anger to Christian conservatives who felt called to oppose any violations of their religious beliefs.44 Licking their wounds, they did all they could to oppose the admission of gays into the military, even if it meant making secular arguments instead of religious ones.
Whether religiously motivated or not, the moral question entered the debate at almost every turn. Rear Admiral John Hutson was a captain in the U.S. Navy JAG in 1993 when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was formulated, serving as the JAG’s executive assistant. This meant he participated in high-level discussions among top navy officers about how to implement Clinton’s plan. In 1997, he became the JAG himself, and it fell to him to enforce the policy.
In discussions about how to handle the gay troops issue, Hutson recalled, there was a “push to make this a question of morality rather than the question of just unit cohesion.” Hutson said the navy brass “declined that option, sort of.” He said “sort of” because it was “implicit in the unit cohesion” argument that homosexuality was immoral. “We never said that it’s OK to be gay,” he said. “We were arguing that it would disrupt unit cohesion; implicitly, then, it wasn’t OK to be gay because if it were, it wouldn’t disrupt unit cohesion. To some extent we wove [the moral] argument in by what we weren’t saying rather than what we were saying.”45
The influence of conservative moralists did not stop there. In May 1993, a group of retired officers formed the Defense Readiness Council, dedicated to preserving the ban on gay troops and disseminating information about homosexuality in the military. The group claimed a hundred members consisting of former and active-duty military personnel, such as Wells-Petry, who championed the group by appearing on a videotape that it distributed to members of Congress and at the Pentagon.46
Another supporter was William Weise, a virulently anti-gay retired Marine brigadier general, who released a report modeled after the army JAG study on homosexual criminal misconduct. Through his military contacts, Weise secured a slot to testify before Congress on the gay ban, where he said that letting gays serve would turn the military into a “wishy-washy force” that would “needlessly cost thousands of American lives,” all because militant activists were demanding “special rights.” General Weise said that his report found there was “much higher criminal activity among the homosexual than the heterosexual population in the military,” even though, like the JAG study, his “data” consisted exclusively of homosexual court-martial records and a made-up figure for how large the gay population was in the military.47
Like many military men, Weise insisted that gay service would “degrade combat effectiveness” but failed to offer a whit of evidence for his claim. Not that he didn’t try. He contended that unit cohesion would suffer if gays were admitted because of the “clearly-stated agenda and objectives of homosexual organizations.” According to Weise, the real goal of gays and lesbians in the military fight was to change society’s behavior, indoctrinate children, stop HIV screening, repeal age-of-consent laws, secure federal funding for explicitly sexual art, and protect abortion rights. He was indignant that gay groups wanted to prevent discrimination in employment, cure AIDS, prevent anti-gay hate crimes, and, indeed, secure statehood for the District of Columbia!48
Weise also included a litany of gay sex crime cases that he had thoroughly researched for his report. Many of the gay crimes were only crimes because homosexuality was itself criminalized. But his report also involved graphic depictions of shower rape, public sex, fraternization, abuse of power, and harassment. Weise’s research cited all the usual suspects, including Wells-Petry, Maginnis, concerned military mothers, and a Korean War vet who described a bloody war scene from his combat tour in 1951, which, he claimed, showed how AIDS today required the exclusion of gays from service. His congressional testimony included as enclosures all the FRC scare studies penned by Maginnis and Knight, along with pictures of showers and toilets and crowded bunks and squad bays. His statement and report, appearing on Family Research Council letterhead,49 were also submitted to Aspin’s Military Working Group.
ONE OF THE clearest indications of the extraordinary impact of the religious right on the gay troops debate was the dissemination of tens of thousands of copies of an anti-gay video. The Gay Agenda showed footage of nudity, spectacle, and simulated sex from the 1992 San Francisco gay pride parade. It was produced by Bill Horn, a conservative Christian who published the anti-gay newsletter The Report. An outgrowth of his church in Lancaster, California, The Report dedicated itself, starting in 1992, to opposing gays in the military by publishing information and interviews and hawking “educational” material, such as the video. In addition to the gay pride scenes, which pictured scantily clad gay men writhing on floats, the twenty-minute film featured representatives of the “ex-gay” movement describing graphic sex practices that they claimed to have disavowed when they finally bested their homosexuality; a physician explaining graphically the purported health dangers of homosexual behavior; and children crying while, according to the narrator, they were watching footage of leering homosexuals.50
In June 1993, The Report merged with Lambda Report, a newsletter edited by Peter LaBarbera, a former writer for the conservative Washington Times. Lambda Report—devoted exclusively to “monitoring the homosexual agenda”— was filled with lurid tales of gay rape, sadomasochism, and conferences on other fetishes often held on public property like state universities, “flogging and fisting” shows, and examples of general decadence and subversion culled from parades, marches, and performances. Satirical entertainment, in which performers and writers parodied right-wing paranoia about gay conspiracies, were a staple resource for the anti-gay movement. It is often unclear if the authors were aware they were drawing on comic exaggerations of the “gay lifestyle”—using them dishonestly to imply they are representative of all gays and lesbians—or simply oblivious. Either way, the result was an amusing but damaging spectacle of earnest social conservatives quoting from parodies of their own paranoia—as proof that their most extreme visions of homosexuality were correct! At the end of the day, the impact was the same: countless more Americans exposed to wildly exaggerated depictions of gay life and quietly confirming that their unloveliest suspicions of what it meant to be gay were indeed true.51
In the spring of 1993, Horn distributed over fifty-five thousand copies of The Gay Agenda. By Horn’s account, the video “kind of rocked the Pentagon.” He got it in the hands of numerous officers who began distributing it to colleagues and even showing it to troops at military bases across the country. Among those who viewed a copy were members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the head of the Marines, General Carl Mundy Jr., who, despite the obviously hysterical and unrepresentative nature of the video, copied it and circulated it to his colleagues. “The military has really pushed this video to the forefront,” said Horn, who also gave copies to members of Congress.52
THE MILITARY CHAPLAINCY was another key source of the increasingly aggressive evangelical presence in the armed forces. In 1993, there were 243 religious denominations represented in the armed forces by 3,152 military chaplains.53 To become one requires securing an endorsement from
an agency of a recognized religious entity, and the number of chaplains representing each religion is determined proportionally to the religious representation in the military population. While military chaplains therefore represented a wide variety of faiths, the predominance of Christian religious leaders in the chaplaincy meant a strong—and growing—culture of conservative cultural values.
Not surprisingly, many chaplains were adamantly against openly gay service. And they were not inclined to keep to themselves. As early as August 1992 the senior leadership of the Marine Corps distributed an official position paper written by the U.S. Navy’s deputy chaplain, Commander Eugene Gomulka, explaining that lifting the ban would threaten the physical and psychological health, and even the lives, of straight service members. The paper insisted that homosexual behavior was a “choice” that “most people do not view as normal,” and worried that the military would “pose a major challenge to gay men who might wish to arrest their behavior.” Gomulka dwelled on the prospect of open homosexuality, writing that “homosexuals do not consider their orientation a private matter, but are inclined to seek public affirmation for their lifestyle.” The disclosure itself, he wrote, amounts to a “demand for a social infrastructure to support the behavior.” Like so many opponents of gay service, Gomulka seemed less concerned by the existence of homosexual behavior than by the recent effort to normalize it. The government, he concluded, had a “legitimate role to play in checking the spread of homosexual behavior,” especially among “innocent” young soldiers, whose minds are still in their “formative stages,” and thus especially vulnerable to the sexual predations of gays and lesbians.54
Unfriendly Fire Page 9