IGF CultureWatch

It's hard to know what to say about James Bowman's essay defending the ban on gays in the military. Andrew Sullivan and Isaac Chotiner take the first shots; I'm still speechless.

Here is the heart of Bowman's argument:

Yet if reason were to be readmitted to the debate, we might find something in the history of military honor to justify the principle now enshrined in the law decreeing that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service." We know that soldiering--I mean not training or support or peacekeeping or any of the myriad other things soldiers do, but facing enemy bullets--is inextricably bound up with ideas of masculinity.

Unpacking the centuries of stereotypes, affronts, provocation and plain old cheap shots jammed into these 70 words will take a week or so at least (and there are plenty more insults where these came from), but here's one that should be at the head of the pack, that I hope will be expanded on by the man who first made it, 18 years ago: Kenneth L. Karst.

In his prescient 1991 law review article, "The Pursuit of Manhood and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces" (38 UCLA L.Rev. 499, Feb. 1991), Professor Karst showed how attempts to keep African-Americans out of the military were of a piece with exclusion of both women and gays from the military. Here is his thesis:

Masculinity is traditionally defined around the idea of power; the armed forces are the nation's preeminent symbol of power . . . The symbolism is not a side effect; it is the main point. From the colonial era to the middle of this century, our armed forces have alternately excluded and segregated blacks in the pursuit of manhood, and today's forms of exclusion and segregation are similarly grounded in the symbolism of masculine power.

In a little over 80 pages, Karst demolished the narrow self-interest of those like Bowman who - whether intentionally or not - try to use the military as a means of affirming their own masculinity at the expense of others. The icing on the cake, of course, is that they then can use the lack of such "masculinity" against those they exclude.

It took generations for African-Americans to fully work their way into America's image of power and authority. Women are still trying. Lesbians and gay men have long been there, but only by agreeing to the extortion of lying - implicitly accepting that gay people should not participate in the very thing they are participating in.

I'd like to see Bowman respond to Karst, if he can. But frankly, I don't know if he's man enough.