D'Souza D'Bigot
Dinesh D’Souza is rapidly approaching the point of being such a blithering idiot whose output isn’t worth reading, let alone refuting (Ann Coulter, I’m thinking of you). His latest piece, “Gays in the military? Ask Cardinal Mahoney,” is filled with sophomoric errors and misrepresentations, of which I would like to address a few:
1. Homosexuality is not “institutionally entrenched” in the Catholic Church. The church mandates celibacy, dishonesty, and the closet—not openness and honesty about human sexuality. This is the exactly opposite of institutional “entrenchment.” (One suspects that sexual problems are endemic in the GOP as in the Catholic Church for the same reason: the institutional bigotry of the closet.)
2. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation; pedophilia is a disorder. Trying to blame gays for child molestation is, to put it frankly, bigoted bullshit.
3. The eventual elimination of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the military—and thereby the closet in which LGBT servicemembers are forced to live—could not conceivably cause “organizational and moral chaos.” (Unless, of course, the D’Souza definition of “moral chaos” is “disobeying the Catholic Church.”)
4. Sparta was not “one of the few groups in history to allow homosexuals in the military,” it was one of the first of a steadily increasing number. (Has he heard of the Sacred Bank of Thebes?) Leaving aside problems inherent in the relatively recent identification of sexual orientation, which skew the historical results, let’s look at some contemporary examples. According to Human Rights Campaign:
“Twenty-four other nations, including Great Britain, Australia, Canada and Israel, already allow open service by gays and lesbians, and none of the 24 report morale or recruitment problems. […] Twenty-three of the 26 NATO nations allow gays and lesbians to serve openly and proudly. The United States, Turkey and Portugal are the only NATO nations that forbid gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed services.”
Here are some other countries that do not allow open military service: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Which group should our nation aspire to join?
5. D’Souza’s flippant comment about gay masculinity and military prowess (“you could only beat a bunch of gays”) is weak even for his pathetic rhetoric, and his “lavender mafia” remark is no better. His ignorance is on most obvious display in his blather about “the ‘male’ or dominant role” and “the ‘female’ or passive role in the relationship.”
As an aside, D’Souza wrote about deconstructing atheism with Stanley Fish at TownHall. The article’s content was lame, and the presentation was even worse; I counted no fewer than four spelling errors. It appears that D’Souza needs a spell-checker in addition to a fact-checker.