re: #65 wrenchwench

Inhofe:

Wait a minute. If you are going to separate the women, the men, and the gay people, wouldn’t you have four groups? Women and men (straight) and then gay women and gay men. Clearly he hasn’t thought this through.

That wouldn’t work. If you want to arrange that no one is sexually attracted to anyone else in the same unit, and if you assume that most soldiers of whatever orientation are fairly likely to find a random young and healthy person of their favored sex attractive, then military units including homosexuals, to achieve the no-attraction goal, would be limited to two people: one gay guy and one lesbian woman.

We don’t utterly separate men and women, and it’s worked out fairly well. The women do sometimes get pregnant, which is a clue that biology has won a round or two against regulations from time to time, but all in all, women soldiers have been an asset to the military and they’ve not impaired unit cohesion or effectiveness. We should expect roughly the same kinds of results if we include homosexuals. Pressing one’s affections on another soldier would remain against the rules, and violations of the rules would still occur, but again, at a level sufficiently low that unit morale and cohesion bear up fine under that modest strain.

The military does need time to think over how it would implement the new system. Gates is right here that if there is to be a new policy, new rules will have to be thought out and new instructions given so that everybody can get used to the idea and know what is expected.