I was in the Burger King by the World Trade Center site when the wall of televisions turned to CNN flashed the news that General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had declared that "homosexual acts between two people are immoral." That's what he believed because that's how he was raised, he said.
The restaurant wasn't crowded, but it was full. People stood up and walked from their seats to stair at the TV and listen. Not just me, a lesbian. Not just the small pack of young gay men in a corner. But a white woman cradling a baby, who leaned back against her husband. A trio of older black women. An aging Chinese man and his wife and a younger woman, maybe their daughter. A couple of men who were speaking some sort of Slavic language, maybe Czech.
They gathered close so that they could hear, because even though it was a story below us and across the street, the WTC site is noisy, spidered with large machines gunning their engines and making reverberating grinds and groans as they dug and flattened and moved the sacred earth.
They were strangely solemn, the ones that gathered there. I watched them, watching. The stood with their arms crossed, silent. CNN could have been announcing a disaster somewhere. That was the tenor of the crowd.
The fall of the Twin Towers is still very present in New York. It is not a faded photograph, but a lived memory. Those of us who live or work in Lower Manhattan, as I do, walk by the site as a matter of course, as we come up from the subway, or go shopping at the discount department store Century 21. Even New Yorkers who don't go downtown much hear something WTC-related almost daily on the news, from first responder health issues, to bickering over the proposed memorial, to new remains found.
New Yorkers don't feel one way about anything, of course. There are 8.2 million of us.
But the one thing that affects every one of us is the missing World Trade Center. Its absence is present, all the time.
And one thing that most New Yorkers seem to understand is that those men and women are fighting for us, because of what happened here at this ground that is now a construction site. We might disagree on whether they should be in Iraq at all, but we all can agree that 9/11 was certainly the catalyst.
We watched General Pace-who was himself born in Brooklyn-compare homosexuality to adultery. And then we watched as another Marine, Eric Alva, one of the first wounded in the Iraq War, a man who recently came out as gay, we watched him thoughtfully tear down Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It's bad policy, he said. It hurts unit cohesion because you can't be honest with the people who are supposed to care for your life like your own.
"He's got it right," one of the women watching, said. This is an instance, I think, of America being ahead of our policy makers. Don't Ask, Don't Tell is a dinosaur. People on the ground in the military know it. Americans watching the military desperately trying to meet recruiting goals know it. The media knows it, which is why the Chicago Tribune asked Pace about Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the first place. Even the men who crafted the policy know it.
The only person who doesn't seem to know it is General Pace. His argument, that gay acts are immoral, doesn't even make sense in this context. Soldiers aren't allowed to "fraternize" with each other already-there are military laws against that sort of thing. So we're not talking about homosexual acts of any kind. What we are talking about is homosexual people-and Pace already thinks that homosexual people should be allowed to serve. That's why he supports Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Pace also says that the military shouldn't look the other way when faced with immoral acts. But, uh, if the military thinks that homosexuals themselves are immoral, than that's exactly what Don't Ask, Don't Tell does-looks the other way and pretends that they're not there.
Back at the Burger King, various CNN experts were weighing in on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, accompanied by video of our soldiers in the Middle East.
The man with the wife and child gestured out the window, his voiced raised slightly. "It's not fair," he said. "Those gay soldiers are fighting for us, for this." He glanced toward the World Trade Center. His wife nodded. If General Pace had been there, I wonder if he would have nodded, too.
3 Comments for “General Pace’s War on Consistency”
posted by Last Of The Moderate Gays on
Don’t get me wrong . . . I’m in full support of having gays serve openly in the military. I just can’t help but think that if all of the time, energy and resources that was spent on this and the marriage issue were spent on non-discrimination in the workplace (a far more popular issue among the general public when compared with the military or marriage issues), we’d be far further along with all three issues. Not all of us join the military, and not all of us want to get married, but all of us need a job . . .
posted by lee on
this is about non-discrimination in the workplace. the discrimination is against homosexuals, the workplace is the us military.
posted by Chris Fox on
I was surprised to read nothing about the weakness of Pace’s opinion. “That’s what I believe because that’s how I was raised.” So whatever morality Pace acquired at his mother’s knee or from his father’s belt has determined what he believes for life, regardless of what experience may try to teach him. He knows homosexuality is immoral, well, just because. “Everyone knows” that.
If unqualified appeal to tradition and squeamishness are the only arrows left in the opposition’s quiver, I’d say we’re close to the Appomatox of the culture war. Hardly anyone under 30 cares what gay people do in bed, and they have no idea what the fuss is about .. “everyone knows” that gays are just people.