Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 7:34pm

Repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

I am a big supporter of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT). Unfortunately, the policy the Senate repealed on Saturday wasn’t the policy I wanted to see repealed.

To be sure, DADT as applied to gays in the military was eventually going to be repealed, even if it was a prudent attempt to prevent relationships within a unit that could endanger lives. I’ll let the military people decide about that. But we should understand what DADT really banned: it banned gays from openly discussing their homosexuality in the military.

So now that homosexuals have won the right to discuss their homosexuality, I wonder if they will be willing to repeal the social policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that is currently applied to Christians who want to discuss their Christianity.

How many times have Christians been told that their religion needs to be kept to themselves? I’m not merely talking about the political sphere here, though to be sure that applies. I’m also talking about every other area: social media, work, art, etc. Even in sermons, priests and preachers are criticized if the homily is too controversial or too Christians. Faith can only be discussed among small groups of like-minded believers in whispers as if the Church was an underground resistance movement. If the faith is to be brought to a broader audience, Christians have been reduced to trying to sneak their faith “through the gate” as CS Lewis described.

If religion is going to cease to be something people just do in the privacy of their homes & churches on Sunday and become a real and revitalizing part of American life, then the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy as applied to Christians has to be done away. After all, if homosexuals (as they argued) cannot truly be themselves unless they can openly discuss their sexuality, why do we have the idea that Christians can be (and indeed must be) Christians while not openly discussing their faith?

Sadly, I imagine the forces behind Saturday’s repeal are among the most avid advocates of the DADT policy as applied to Christians.

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Bill Sr.
Bill Sr.
Monday, December 20, AD 2010 3:21pm

The liberal progressives who “aggressively” sought the repeal of DADT for military personnel now have the right to include those same liberated soldiers in their infamous rants and wailings on how inherently evil the armed protectors of our “freedoms” are. Some liberation, some progress, some “rights” victory for our troops who have volunteered to provide cover for malcontents and the right to be legally and verbally assaulted by their comrades with a different “lifestyle”. The slope gets slippery with each concession to political correctness.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, December 20, AD 2010 4:27pm

It seems as if the regime does not approve the Church’s teachings on faith and morals.

Thanks for voting in the tyrants.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, December 20, AD 2010 4:43pm

Societies have their ethic and their manners and orthodoxies. I would seriously doubt that a society where free discussion of the moral codes of the Church or the (non-decadent) protestant congregations was undertaken would be one where free discussion of (one’s own) sexual perversion was undertaken, or would be one for very long. There are stable equilibria and inchoate situations or unstable equilibria.

Consider the following hypothesis: the homosexual population forms a sort of dyad with various sectors: the helping professions and the eductional apparat and the newsroom and the chatterati, and the dyad has as its bond a mutual exchange of ego satisfactions. (See Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed on the function of ‘mascot groups’). This sort of exchange has nothing to do with comity or liberality.

Now consider these remarks from Prof. Jeremy Waldron (in an essay titled, “Secularism and the Limits of Community”):

I wonder, though, how typical this is. When I read the Catholic
case against gay marriage, for example, I am not convinced by it; but I
find there is very little Leviticus-quoting or invocation of papal
authority. What I read are elaborate tissues of argument and reason,
open to disputation and vulnerable in the usual way to quibble, rejoinder,
and refutation. Certainly the arguments have an infuriating quality –
they read, as Richard Posner once said of John Finnis’s writings, as
though they had been translated out of medieval Latin. But actually
what’s infuriating about people like Finnis is not any adamantine
fundamentalism but their determination to actually argue on matters that
many secular liberals think should be beyond argument, matters that we
think should be determined by shared sentiment or conviction. My
experience is that many who are convinced of the gay rights position are
upset more by the fact that their argumentative religious opponents
refuse to take the liberal position for granted than they are by the more
peremptory tactics of the “bible-bashers.”

Again, orthodoxies.

Appended to this is the aggression of the gay press and gay lobby, which is fairly blatant and given a free pass by the liberal establishment.

We can either deal with it or deal with dhimmi status.

Phillip
Phillip
Monday, December 20, AD 2010 7:07pm

Another step to normalize homosexual behavior. Such efforts contradict human nature and natural law. As a priest I knew once said, “God forgives everything, men some things and nature nothing.” We’ll see how nature ultimately reacts.

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Tuesday, December 21, AD 2010 12:11am

[…] Repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” – Michael Denton, The American Catholic […]

Jim
Jim
Tuesday, December 21, AD 2010 5:31am

Re “So now that homosexuals have won the right to discuss their homosexuality, I wonder if they will be willing to repeal the social policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that is currently applied to Christians who want to discuss their Christianity.”, the argument is murky: is the target the military? (if so, its disingenuous since Christians discuss their Christianity all the time in the military.)

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Tuesday, December 21, AD 2010 9:51am

[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Cary D Conover and Michael Denton. Michael Denton said: @matt9484 Why DADT ought to be repealed-but hasn't yet. https://the-american-catholic.com/2010/12/20/repealing-dont-ask-dont-tell/ […]

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