Badpuppy Gay Today

Wednesday, 12 March, 1997

Straight Sex-Abuse Struggle In Military Grows."


"Lowering Troops Morale Called "Treason!"


"Legal Action Now Available to Molested Servicewomen"


by Patricia Conklin

 

"Lowering Troops Morale Called "Treason!"


Recent news breaks have fueled public knowledge of a growing number of sex abuses perpetrated by purportedly heterosexual males and affecting a growing number of U.S. servicewomen who languish in despair and must face daily workplace difficulties as a result. Yesterday's biggest scoop dealt with what some are calling "treasonous" behavior on the part of top-level military officials who, allegedly, have self-servingly manipulated earlier complaints by a group of abused servicewomen. "By allowing any corrupt military investigators to treat loyal troops in this shabby way," states a prominent social justice activist, "we lower United States troop morale, thus giving true aid and comfort to the enemy. This, we must certainly agree, is the constitutional definition of treason."

There's talk, in fact, among a few nationally-known gay activists and strategists, about how it may soon be necessary to call attention to this plethora of embarrassing hetero-sexist excesses. Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, of Washington, D.C., says offending officials who dismiss gays should be named and pilloried in a continuing media blitz. Kameny told GayToday on Monday that he favors making the names of military prosecutors and inspectors known, thereafter defaming them, "bringing them into public contempt, and ridicule." Because of their hypocrisy, says Kameny, such officials should be hounded by activists so that their lives become "an on-going, never-ending, 24-hours a day nightmare."

By comparison with this outcropping of blatant heterosexual philandering, gay and lesbian interludes appear to be pointedly idyllic. "A spread among these liars of such honorless hypocrisy, bad faith and mad machismo," says Georgia's Willis Bivins, "underlies the Pentagon's hopelessly corrupt policy, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell.." Bivins complains that the military brass is consumed by macho fears they'll be thought homosexuals if they live with public knowledge either near or among homosexuals. "This fear, which is only insecurity, is at least partly what makes such officials rush forward to prove themselves, inching and fondling servicewomen who inhabit lower military ranks. At the very same time such sexually insecure persons are apt to instigate witch hunts against openly gay troops who are reminders to them of their own dysfunctional sex phobias. Openly gay troops provide them, instead, with annoying constant reminders that being gay is compatible with masculinity and with high service standards and military know-how."

"Straight military officers unable to keep hands off women they outrank must be made aware there are organizations offering abused women legal assistance. One, called Women Active in Our Nation's Defense, has existed for four years in Denver," says Mary Finlayson, a women's advocate. Dr. Kameny suggests that the solution to heterosexual abuses would be an all-gay military. "Heterosexuality is incompatible with military service," he says, putting an unexpected slant on an official but outdated military policy which pillories same-sex love.

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