Gays in Military: Why All the Fuss?

So much fuss about homosexuals in the military. You’d think the nation had nothing better to get worked up about.

Frankly, it’s difficult to understand what all the fuss is about, especially since no one is currently forced to serve in the armed forces. The arguments against homosexuals openly serving in the military might have some merit if service in the military was compulsory. But it’s not; service in the U.S. military is entirely voluntary, settled by contract.

Were homosexuals permitted to openly serve in the military without facing discrimination, no one would be forced to serve with them if they found such service intolerable, immoral, or in any other way unappealing. If you don’t like some provision in a contract, you don’t sign it--pretty simple stuff, contracts.

Moreover, since no one has a right to serve in the U.S. military, no rights are trampled by an executive order which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual preference against individuals who volunteer to serve.

I realize that such a position is non-responsive to those who believe as a matter of faith that homosexuality is immoral, sinful and “contrary to nature.” However, to let a matter of religious faith determine federal public policy violates America’s time-honored principle prescribing the separation of church and state.

The issue of homosexual rights isn’t going to go away once discrimination is prohibited in the U.S. military. America’s custodians of particularistic morality won’t let it.

The fuss over homosexuals in the military is just one of the first skirmishes in the battle to end discrimination against individuals solely on the basis of personal and private attributes.

Future generations of American historians will record the struggle against discrimination on the basis of sexual preference with the same admiration we have already accorded the struggles against discrimination based on religious preference, race and gender.

MARK P. PETRACCA

Irvine