Bob Maistros

So the other day a Facebook friend and former colleague put up a post praising four Republican Senators (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) who had ditched their colleagues and helped repeal the law banning overt homosexuals from serving in the military.

I commented, in my own inimitable way, “Unlike.  RINOs.”

Taken from my good side.

To which this Facebook friend responded in equally witty fashion:  “UN-like BOB. Neanderthal.”

Which got me to thinking:  what does someone like this individual mean when he calls someone like me a “Neanderthal?”

Employing my usual depth and thoroughness of research, I found my way to Wikipedia and discovered the following:

“In popular idiom the word Neanderthal is sometimes used as an insult, to suggest that a person combines a deficiency in intelligence and a propensity toward brute force, as well as perhaps implying that the person is old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas ….”

Well.  I certainly don’t want to imagine that my erstwhile comrade was implying I was dumb or violent.  I would prefer to think that he was using the term in the second meaning suggested above, a person who is “old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas ….”

Here I plead guilty as charged.  Although I would take exception to the concept that the ideas to which I am attached are “outdated.”

My friend, in reality, was using the word “Neanderthal” as shorthand for “conservative.”  But in fact, I don’t generally look at the world in terms of liberal and conservative.  I really don’t.

I prefer to view matters through another prism:  “right” and “wrong.”

We have two ways of considering right and wrong.  One can be amoral (not “immoral”) in judgment:  there is a right way and a wrong way to accomplish things.  I believe the income tax is the wrong way to go about collecting revenue for the government, but it isn’t per se immoral.

The other is profoundly moral – one judges “right” and “wrong” in terms of “good” and “evil.”  Murdering someone is wrong not just because of its negative policy implications, but because it is bad.

Liberals ask us to compartmentalize this thinking and remove any moral dimension from policy considerations.  Just because we think that a behavior – homosexuality – is “wrong” in the moral sense, we should not insert that judgment in setting policy. Of course, they also insist that behaviors such as homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, single parenthood, divorce, abortion, sex outside of marriage, pornography and the like are not “wrong” – they are merely “alternative.”

In the case of the military, if someone has valuable qualifications – for example, if he possesses prized linguistic capabilities in Arabic or Farsi – then he or she should be in.

Except that’s not how the world works.  If the last two generations have taught us anything, it is that moral rights and wrongs have profound policy implications.

Divorce, pre-marital sex and single parenthood have immense costs in terms of economic well-being, educational attainment, public health, and a wide range of related social pathologies.  Abortion is leading to black genocide, costing us future workers to pay for unfunded government liabilities, and pushing us down that long-warned-about slippery slope on life issues.

And I am convinced that allowing homosexuals to serve “out of the closet” in the military will indeed, as warned, have a negative effect on morale and readiness (not to mention public health and budget implications), and in ways not generally heretofore discussed.

Just wait for that GLBT Servicemembers Association raising a passel of demands relating to treatment of gays in the military that undermine discipline and drive up costs.  And soon after, a whole series of politically driven “firsts:” the first “openly gay” general, and admiral, and so on.  Being gay will actually be an advantage for “diversity” purposes.

“Neanderthal,” people like my friend will cleverly retort.  “Do you know better than military leaders who say that allowing homosexuals to serve openly is no problem?”

Nope.  In fact, their very acquiescence illustrates my point: these leaders are making a considered political judgment that overrides their true feelings about the effect on readiness and morale.

“And don’t you think we’ve always had gays in the services?”  Yep.  But the fact that they were not permitted to serve openly limited their ability to affect discipline.  They had to behave as if they were adhering to the military code, even if they weren’t.

The “outdated ideas” to which this Neanderthal adheres are actually timeless principles.  And the military was one of the last places in society where these principles were allowed to be embedded in a code of conduct, because its leaders understood that its personnel’s moral character would eventually shape its cohesiveness and overall capability.

The morally right way and wrong way to go about things are in reality the actual right and wrong way to go about things, because these principles represent eternal truth.  Unfortunately, we are learning that today, even the military can’t handle the truth.

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