The Poison Pill of Bestiality in Repealing the Military Ban on Sodomy

So Congress has been working on a repeal on the military’s ban on sodomy between humans.  And believe it or not you have to make that specification “between humans” because the Uniform Code of Military Justice defines sodomy as including bestiality as well.  From CNS news:

Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

It states: "(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. (b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

Any lawyers out there will tell you that this isn’t too difficult to deal with in repeal.  Indeed, I suspect most non-lawyers get that, too.  Instead of repealing the entire section in its entirety, all Congress has to is direct that the current statute be replaced with something close to this:

(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. (b) Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

There, that’s not so difficult, is it?  Except for some reason the version passed in the Senate didn’t do that; instead it repealed the whole thing.  Which led to silliness like this:

Which, um, talk about whiffing an easy throw.  Mr. Carney, the correct answer is “No, the President does not support bestiality.  Next question.”  Or if throw in the phrase “are you an idiot?” if you are feeling cranky.  But instead Carney stupidly chose to ignore the question. This then gives Michele Bachmann an opening to denounce the whole thing when talking to Glenn Beck:

And even those attention whores at PETA had to stick their noses into it, denouncing Carney for his idiotic response:

“We were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality,” the group wrote in a letter to Carney. “With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed — and for good reason.”

This might have been taken seriously before the last fifty or so idiotic attention-whoring stunts like telling people to drink beer instead of milk.  PETA has squandered whatever credibility they ever had.

But the truth what is going on here is revealed by this passage in The Hill piece quoted above:

As the final Defense authorization bill gets hammered out in conference committee, one surprising issue is riling both social conservatives and animal rights activists: the repeal of a ban on sodomy and bestiality.

The Senate bill, which was passed last week, removed an article from the Uniform Code of Military Justice stating “unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.”

But the article is still included in the House bill, and House Republicans want it to remain in the final bill.

(Emphasis added.)  Now, no one has figured out why the Senate version also repealed the ban on bestiality, but however it happened, it seems that House Republicans are using this as what is classically known as a poison pill.  If you are unaware of the tactic, here’s how it works.  If Congresspersons want to kill a law, but can’t quite get it voted down as is, they then insert something into the law that they believe will render the law unacceptable.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 demonstrates both 1) how the approach is supposed to work, and 2) how it can backfire.  Did you ever wonder why it was that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came to protect people not only from racial discrimination but also gender-based discrimination?  Well, because racists opposed to the law proposed adding language extending the law’s prohibitions to sex-based discrimination, that’s how.  They believed that this would render the bill unacceptable to just enough members of Congress to allow them to defeat it and when some Congresspersons in favor of the bill tried to remove the language prohibiting sex discrimination, a coalition of racists and feminists blocked the effort.  The racists were gambling that this provision would prove to be a poison pill that killed the entire thing, while the small minority of feminists hoped it would still pass.  And surely you know who turned out to be right.

So that is plainly what is really happening right now.  Like I said, no one has explained how the bill came to be in its current form.  I would never assume that stupidity is not a possible explanation.  But however it got there, it seems pretty obvious that it is being retained as a poison pill.  How would you like to run for Congress next year when your opponent can correctly assert that you voted to legalize sex with animals in the military? I am not particularly happy about that approach—I prefer policies to be determined in a much more straightforward approach than that. I mean today it will be Republicans using the poison pill of legalizing bestiality.  Tomorrow it will be Democrats sticking in a provision requiring cute puppies to be drowned in an effort to kill a bill that would actually balance the budget.  And in either case it means that a bill’s fate  is less likely to be determined by its merits, which is not a good thing in a republic.

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OMG!!! O’Donnell Compared Gay Sex to Adultery (and Other Idiocy Related to Gay Rights)

Christine O’Donnell makes an adult point about gays in the military during the debate last night.  Think progress plays the tired game of “can you believe she compared gay sex to that?”

Specifically when asked about DADT, she said (assuming Thinkprogress is not actually lying—which is not always a safe assumption with them):

The military already regulates personal behavior in that it doesn’t allow affairs to go on within your chain of command. It does not allow it you are married to have an adulterous affair within the military. So the military already regulates personal behavior because it feels that it is in the best interest of our military readiness.

So Thinkprogress argues this is “compare[ing] allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military to ‘adultery.’”  First, she was not saying allowing gays to serve openly is like the act of adultery.  Second, she was not comparing gay sex to adultery, either.  She was pointing out that the military does in fact regulate private consensual sexual behavior that the law ordinarily would not prohibit, and few would even credibly question that practice.  You can literally go to jail for adultery in the military.  And it makes the point that whatever right to privacy exists in civilian life is significantly reduced in military life.  If you can prohibit adultery in the military without a constitutional problem, it significantly undermines the argument for repealing DADT.

This is a logical and cogent argument.  And Think Progress wants to pretend that it is somehow out of bounds.  Don’t play this game, conservatives.  By the time you are done, you won’t be allowed to make any argument for your side on any subject.

Also for bonus points they denounced her belief that being gay is an “identity disorder” four years ago, explaining that it is a “position that has been universally rejected by science and psychology since the early 1970s.”

Oh, there is a consensus!  Where have we heard that before?

Well, Now This Sounds Like an Awesome Movie

Remember the Wachowski Brothers?  They made the movie The Matrix and we thought they were going to be genius of cinema for the next 30 years.  And then around the release of Speed Racer, we realized that something went horribly wrong.

And now they plan to give us a movie about a forbidden gay affair.  And wow, doesn’t this sound like quality?  (yes, spoilers are coming.  Oh well.):

[P]art of the film takes place in the future all right — nearly a hundred from now. But its main story is told in Cloverfield-esque flashbacks by digital archeologists sorting through “found footage” from CNN and chips from old digital cameras from the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The heroes are indeed a gay American soldier named (with little irony) "Butch" and an Iraqi soldier turned militant. Butch is endearing, young, and a ravishingly handsome Marine. Our spies tell us that he "just wants to fuck and kill everything" in Iraq — until, that is, he falls in love with the Iraqi.

The two meet while Butch is on a combat patrol in Iraq during the second Gulf War, and soon enough, the two are engaged in graphically described sex (actual line from the script: "They rut like animals behind this fence") albeit while disguised in burqas. The two soldiers’ relationship blossoms, and Butch begins to get to know his lover's family. But after he inadvertently draws attention to their ancestral home, disaster strikes. This tragedy radicalizes the pair and they become convinced that the only way to rid the world of evil is to kill the architect of the invasion, the then-president of the United States, George W. Bush. And so, during one of the president’s secret sorties to Iraq, they attempt to assassinate him.

Wow, that sounds so aweful it might actually be entertaining in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sort of way.  And I find the message to be a bit confused.  So a gay soldier decides to start having sex with the enemy and that affair leads him to want to kill the President.  Okay.  So is that pro- or anti- gays-in-the-military?

I am being facetious of course.  We know it is pro-gays-in-the-military but what a strange way to advance their cause.  And its good to know that wet dreams about assassinating Bush never go out of style, even if Bush is no longer the president.

Also the cognitive dissonance on display couldn’t be greater.  So the American and the terrorist believe that they should help...  the terrorists.

You know, because the terrorists are so tolerant of homosexuality.  *rolls eyes*

Facepalm Time

You know, I was the first person I know of, way back in February, who pointed out that if Judge Walker of the Proposition 8 trial was gay, this would be a problem.  And Patterico did, too.  And we thought we raised it in a serious, respectful fashion.  So when I went to Law.com in my daily reads and saw an article mentioning that a party seeking to fi    le an amicus had raised the issue, I was like “finally!”

Then I read the thing.  Go ahead read it for yourself.  We’ll let Jesus express my feelings as you do.

Wow, that is literally so bad that it actually hurts the cause.  It distracts from the serious issue.  I said way back in February that I was tempted to file a complaint on my own.  Consider that a looming possibility.

Of Rabbis and Gay Soldiers...

I touched on this in my last post discussing the opinion striking down Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), but one case that is particularly on point is Goldman v. Weinberger.  In that case, Goldman, an orthodox Rabbi ran afoul of regulations that would prohibit him from wearing a yarmulke.  As you may know, many Jews consider it a command from God to always keep one on, and so he was literally being asked to choose between obeying God or Uncle Sam.  We should be loathe as a society to force that kind of choice on anyone, as a matter of policy rather than law.  He sued to prevent enforcement of those regulations and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost.

I have already highlighted Stevens’ extremely deferential approach, but many on the left are claiming that in fact the judge was deferential in the DADT case as well.  Now there is no doubt she said she was, but that assertion does not withstand scrutiny.  It was lip service.  How do I know this?  Because all of the arguments she arrayed against DADT applied equally to the rule in Goldman.  Now you can read through it all and hear in excruciating detail how awful she thinks this is as a matter of police, but fortunately starting on page 74 she summarizes her points.  So let’s look at each and see how well they apply to Rabbi Goldman’s plight all those years ago.  She states that the Petitioners (the Log Cabin Republicans et. al.) have shown the following bulleted points to be true:

• by impeding the efforts to recruit and retain an all-volunteer military force, the Act contributes to critical troop shortages and thus harms rather than furthers the Government's interest in military readiness;

 Which applies applies to both orthodox jews and gay soldiers.  Check.

“Permission to Speak Freely” or “Full Metal Idiocy on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

So yesterday a Federal Judge, Virginia Phillips, struck down the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) statute for military service.  Do I have to tell you this was in California?  Yeah it’s the fucking Ninth Circuit, again.  The decision is so awful it is frankly hard to know where to begin.  But let’s start with the political issue, first.  This decision can and should be laid right at the feet of Barrack Obama if this passage in the opinion is correct: “Finally, it again must be noted that Defendants called no witnesses, put on no affirmative case, and only entered into evidence the legislative history of the Act.”

You get that?  What it implies is that the Obama administration’s lawyers took a dive.  Now I am a little cautious about believing the judge on this point, after the shenanigans Judge Walker pulled in the Proposition 8 case.  I am once bitten, twice shy, now.  But if the judge is telling the truth, once again we are seeing government officials who are charged with a duty to defend the constitutionality of any law, even laws they disagree with, making only a cursory effort to comply with that duty.

Indeed, it quotes statements of opinion by the President and Admiral Mike Mullen and treats it like an “admission” of the defendants, which strikes me as dubious.

But let’s get to the meat of the issue.