Unfriendly Fire

by Dr. Nathaniel Frank

  Gomulka’s paper spread rapidly throughout the senior leadership, winning praise from Mundy, as well as from Rear Admiral Roberta Hazard, the highest-ranking woman in the navy, and Captain Larry Ellis, the top Marine Corps chaplain. Ellis sent the paper around to senior officers and chaplains of the army, navy, and air force in order to “stimulate their thinking” on the issue of gays in the military, breaking a long chaplaincy tradition of avoiding public comment on such controversial issues.55

  The early rhetoric of opposition to gay service did not distinguish between open and concealed homosexual service. Once the distinction was made, however, the rhetoric of opponents continued to betray a troubling lack of reasoned thought. Gomulka wrote that because homosexuality “can threaten the lives, including the physical (e.g., AIDS) and psychological well being of others,” it was essential to bar “acknowledged homosexuals” from the military. Yet if the risk of HIV infection was truly increased by the presence of gay soldiers, surely the best way to combat it would be to identify the sources of the disease, not to drive the infected underground and out of sight.56

  One of the largest, most powerful of the chaplain endorsing agencies was the Commission on Chaplains of the National Association of Evangelicals. The NAE had been a powerful religious interest group since World War II, but it gained national notoriety well after “don’t ask, don’t tell” had been enshrined. In November 2006, Ted Haggard, the NAE’s president, resigned following revelations that he paid for sex and drugs from a male prostitute. Less than a month after the story broke, Haggard, married with four children, announced through spokespeople that he had received counseling (from, among others, James Dobson) and was now “completely straight.” The comment reflected the worldview of the 15 million constituents the NAE claimed to represent: that with faith in Jesus, people with homosexual inclinations could cleanse themselves and live happy, healthy heterosexual lives. The NAE represented fifty thousand churches from seventy denominations across the United States. In 1993, over seven hundred of the military’s chaplains had been endorsed by member churches.57

  Starting late in 1992, the NAE worked feverishly behind the scenes to ensure the continuation of the gay ban, even if, ultimately, it meant emphasizing secular rationales in place of religious ones. The NAE estimated that it met with one hundred military groups to discuss the issue and it devoted enormous resources to developing an effective approach to defeat Clinton’s campaign promise. Paying close attention to polls, the NAE discovered that only a third of those who opposed gay service did so on the grounds of “moral judgments.” In response, strategists shifted their tactics to highlight the “practical concerns” of gay service, in line with what groups like FRC had determined was the most effective way of fighting gay service. Brigadier General Richard Abel, head of the Campus Crusade for Christ’s military ministry, said his group was taking an “operational” rather than a moral or religious approach “on purpose—because most people are not Bible-believers.” Part of Abel’s approach was to distribute as many copies of Horn’s Gay Agenda video as he could. He gave them to active-duty service members and veterans, tossing it into whatever laps he could find. He believed that if enough people saw what the homosexual lifestyle was like, up to 90 percent of the public would oppose gays in the military. He also met personally with colleagues in the Pentagon as well as retired officers to shore up support for the ban, calling the visits “informational” so as to skirt restrictions on formal lobbying.58

  Abel’s Military Ministry became a resource center for military officers working out how to respond to the gay service issue. In 1992, it moved its offices from San Diego to the East Coast, where it served as a coordinating headquarters for over a thousand like-minded groups. Its leader, General Abel, led morning Bible study at Langley Air Force Base and helped facilitate other military Bible study groups, whose members “find many ways and places to use our training in evangelism and discipleships.” Set up to give “hope and help” to active-duty service members and their families, the Military Ministry worked full-time to spread the gospel throughout the armed forces.59

  In a paper written by General Abel, the familiar view of homosexuality—as a matter of choice and a harbinger of AIDS—emerged as the predictable basis for opposition to gay service. But above all, Abel equated homosexuality with selfishness, and cast gay inclusion in the military as the death of selfless service. Anti-gay activists spoke as though the gay struggle for inclusion and the right to be honest about sexual identity was more than a quest for equality but an insistence on “special rights,” an elevation of self-interest above that of the whole. This was the point of the widespread rhetoric that spoke of militant homosexual activists forcing their lifestyle on others. In reality, it was not just the effort to assert equal rights that bugged social conservatives; homosexuality itself was, for them, inseparable from uncontrolled pleasure, the epitome of self-interest and thus a grave threat to the social norms of self-restraint on which social stability depended. “Subordination of self-will to the greater good of the unit,” wrote Abel, is essential for military readiness. Discipline “is the antithesis of self-serving self-advancement.” He ended his paper by driving the point home: “One final word may be good to keep in mind: ‘Selflessness.’ It forms the bedrock supporting the very concept of military or civil service and is inseparable from the personal and corporate sacrifice which national service—in or out of uniform—is all about.”60

  Ultimately, groups like the NAE decided on a two-pronged approach. They would continue to stress moral and religious outrage whenever they could, hoping to galvanize their base to oppose gay equality in the political realm; but they would simultaneously push their military liaisons to the front lines and encourage them to make their case in terms of military effectiveness—in line with the tactic embraced by social conservative groups in the civilian world such as the Family Research Council. “We thought that the best strategy was to allow those with military experience to speak to this issue, rather than one of us in the NAE Office of Public Affairs,” acknowledged NAE director Robert Dugan, Jr. “None among us had military experience.”61

  The NAE targeted both military and political leaders. On the day of Bill Clinton’s inauguration, Ted Edgren, director of the NAE’s Commission on Chaplains, wrote to the new president, with accompanying letters to Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, and Colin Powell. As Edgren claimed he was helping the political leaders to bring “reason and caution” to the issue of gay service, his tone was one of desperation more than caution. Imploring political leaders to defeat the proposal to lift the ban, he argued that openly gay service would be “bad for the services.” “May I ask you, in fact, beg you, to intercede,” he wrote to Nunn, hoping the senator would press Clinton to delay any action until hearings were held. “May we ask you to attempt one more time to personally talk with” Clinton, he wrote to Powell, to assure gays would not stain the military. “For us,” he wrote, “this is ultimately a moral issue!” But in case that didn’t convince, he reiterated, this time to Clinton himself, that it was also a “military readiness” issue but “with moral-spiritual implications.”62

  With the letters, the NAE enclosed its statement, “Homosexual Behavior and Military Service,” which sought to distinguish between homosexual behavior, which it said was “against God’s law,” and a homosexual “tendency, proclivity or orientation toward such behavior,” which were “not under condemnation.” The statement said that the military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice criminalizes “homosexual acts” and that it was crucial “to be consistent in dealing with all forms of sexual sin” so as not to discriminate against any particular group.” The statement was astonishing in either its ignorance or disingenuousness, since the UCMJ does not mention “homosexual acts” but bans “sodomy,” which includes both anal sex and oral sex among gays or straights. To be “consistent” and “not discriminate” would mean to punish roughly 80 percent of the military, the estimate
d portion of Americans who engage in oral or anal sex.63

  Despite the statement’s fuzzy distinction between behavior and proclivities, in its own literature the NAE was adamantly anti-gay. Its newsletter, Insight, which shared a name and graphic with FRC’s newsletter but was reportedly unconnected, counseled conservatives to prepare to respond to gay demands for equality with arguments about “showers, barracks, blood banks, and AIDS.” It advertised videotapes that purported to tell the truth about the threat of the “homosexual perversion.”64

  Like FRC, the NAE sent contradictory messages about whether military necessity or morality dictated the gay exclusion policy. “Homosexuals insist that the issue is discrimination,” said one newsletter, “but the real point is the purpose of the military—fighting and winning wars.” Seven lines down, however, a quite different rationale was offered. The letter called the “homosexualization of the military” a “counter-cultural assault on the last major American institution to resist the attack on traditional values.” It concluded: “How can God bestow His favor on an army or a nation which condones that which He declares to be an abomination.”65

  In testimony before the House Republican Research Committee, a resource group for the Republican leadership chaired by Representative Duncan Hunter of California, Edgren let his homophobia run free. Offering an idealized narrative of traditional heterosexual purity, he complained that “It is not fair to the mothers of America to subject their sons and daughters to immoral influences.” To Edgren, discrimination was the only fair thing to do. “To continue to exclude homosexuals from military service is to do ‘what is fair to all the citizens of our nation.’ ” Edgren formulated his views by drawing from “my own personal experience” with homosexuals, although he never made clear what that experience was. His diagnosis of the homosexual was that he had been turned gay through molestation and ensuing “arrested development,” has low self-esteem, and “views himself as worthless, trapped in a pattern of behavior from which he cannot escape.” He is “often borderline suicidal, since he is well aware that he is an object of scorn and revulsion over what he does.” He is found “betraying the petty character traits and actions of a small child, and is capable of perpetrating actions upon others that will enhance his self-esteem at their expense,” including recruiting and molesting straight men. “Finally, this obsession overtakes him, blotting out all other considerations, dominating his life, such as it has become, and rendering him incapable of sublimating his own desires to the good of the unit, the service, the nation, or his fellow man. He is a tragic figure,” Edgren concluded, and “he needs treatment, he needs compassion, he needs hope, he needs the love of Christ. He is not a combat-ready soldier.”66

  Keeping gays out of the military became such a fixation for some conservative Christians that entire new careers emerged out of the issue. Early in 1993, Edgren tapped Brigadier General James Hutchens to become associate director of the Chaplains Commission. Hutchens, retired from the army in 1992 after thirty-seven years of service, was a spokesman for the Presbyterian and Reformed Joint Commission on Chaplains and Military Personnel. He wrote in The Centurion, the newsletter of the Commission on Chaplains, that he had been moved to take the position at the NAE because of the gays in the military issue. His duty was to “buil[d] the house of the Lord,” and for him, that meant “saying yes to Jim Edgren’s invitation” to strengthen the body of Christ “as we seek to give visibility from an evangelical viewpoint to the issue of homosexuals in the military.”67

  When it learned that Congress would hold hearings that spring on the issue of gays in the military, the NAE requested to testify, hoping to keep the nation focused on the moral dimension of gay service. In May, the NAE would get its wish, securing for Hutchens the opportunity to testify before the House of Representatives (see Chapter 4). He was one of several influential religious figures who were able to use the halls of government to spread their message that homosexuality was a dangerous “moral virus” that must be stopped.68

  Working alongside the NAE was the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, another powerful endorsing agency. Representing over 5 million people and more than a thousand churches, the CFGC was equally vociferous in its quest to keep gays out of the military. In January 1993, the group wrote an open letter to President Clinton and sent copies to over five thousand fellowship groups, churches, and senior leaders in the Pentagon and Congress. Letting gays in the military, said the letter, “would do more than just undermine discipline and morale, although they would do that as well. Homosexuals are notoriously promiscuous.” They are “perverted,” “aggressive recruiters,” and “going for the young—pedophiles.” Should “innocent soldiers” be forced to serve “with someone lusting after them?” Should they be required to aid injured comrades “whose body fluids may be spilling out, without the benefit of latex gloves?” The rest of the letter was filled with biblical references to homosexuality, noting passages condemning sodomites to death and lumping them with prostitutes, thieves, drunkards, and “the greedy.”69

  The CFGC letter contained an essential ingredient in the thinking that would eventually birth “don’t ask, don’t tell.” As Christian witnesses to the kingdom of God, the religious right was at its most indignant not so much when the word of God was neglected but when such neglect was not properly sanctioned. “Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die,” quoted the letter, citing the New Testament on sodomy, “they not only do them but approve those who practice them.” Military officers, said the letter, would be obliged to resign if the ban were lifted because to continue to serve would mean being “blind” to violations of moral absolutes.70

  Such beliefs were echoed in Bible study material disseminated by and circulated among military leaders throughout 1993. A document entitled “What the Bible Teaches About Homosexuality: A Study of Scripture Passages” emphasized that God’s anger focused on “communities that, like Sodom and Gomorrah, tolerate and support homosexuality.” Indeed, “the haughty ‘parading’ (i.e., the public celebration) of their homosexuality by the residents of Sodom seems to have increased the urgency of divine judgment on their community.” The scripture condemned in particular those who “parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. . . . They have brought disaster on themselves.” This study material was included in a packet sent to researchers by Ted Shadid, an editor of Command, the magazine of the Officers’ Christian Fellowship.71

  By summer, the CFGC had, along with other evangelical military groups, become obsessed with the issue of gay troops. Its annual conference that June was consumed by sessions on gays in the military. Ultimately it adopted a policy paper condemning homosexuality as “socially destructive behavior” (along with substance abuse, adultery, and fornication) and making clear that “only through the redemptive power of the Gospel [of] Jesus Christ can every person fulfill his or her own ultimate potential.” It sent the policy paper out to the usual list of thousands of members and national political and military leaders, urging its membership to “take a public stand to MAINTAIN THE BAN” by becoming politically active.72

  The CFGC also sent to each of its chaplains a book by retired colonel Ronald Ray called Military Necessity and Homosexuality. The newsletter announced that Ray’s book “presents the truth about homosexuality” and makes a compelling case for retaining the “375-year-old ban against homosexuals openly serving in the military services.” Ray’s depiction of gays and his case against letting them serve recycled the unhinged stereotypes and extremist rhetoric of his anti-gay evangelical colleagues. His book contended that gays were addicted to sex, that they engaged in practices that “are inherently degrading or humiliating and are rarely practiced by heterosexuals,” that pedophilia was “close to the heart of homosexuality,” and that gays acted compulsively to obtain sex, especially once they come out of the closet. “In coming out,” he wrote, “a homosexual throws off most social and moral restraints on sexual behavior and embraces and su
rrenders entirely to the ‘gay lifestyle,’ which, for most male homosexuals, is extraordinarily promiscuous.”73

  Like so many social conservatives, Ray used homosexuals as a symbolic stand-in for all that was immoral, uncontrolled, and unconnected to old certainties. “The gay community,” he wrote, was “seized by a deadly fatalism that sees life as absurd and short.” They do not care about the future or about others, only about the pleasures of the moment. “They have no direct links with the next generation, no reason to invest in the future, no reason to defer gratification. Their lives consist of little more than having an exciting time while life lasts and seeking ‘self-fulfillment,’ a modern euphemism for selfish gratification and ambition.”74

  THE IMPACT OF the religious right’s organizing was profound. The new Clinton White House and the existing cadre of gay advocacy groups were totally unprepared for the opposition they would encounter in achieving what some had said was already a “done deal.”75 And it was the conservative Christian leadership, a sometimes loosely connected but devastatingly effective consortium of individuals and research centers and media outlets, that caused this issue to explode on the American stage. The consistency, passion, and vehemence with which conservative military officials methodically set about to inject themselves into what might have been a relatively minor discussion over military personnel regulations was unusual even in the heated history of military-political disagreements and is further evidence of the success of the social conservative crusade.