Rules are rules.
There are a lot of people in the world. Really. Lots and lots. Our society is a complex machine of literally billions of interconnected lives, all potentially pulling in different directions, prone to fly apart at any moment and yet miraculously holding together in an enforced alliance of common values. We can live as a society because ultimately we are all prepared to give up certain freedoms in exchange for the satisfaction of other needs. Without the rules, legal, moral and social, which we generally all agree on, we couldn't function as any kind of group.
This has always been the case. No society made up of truly, existentially free people could ever exist, because they would never be prepared to curb their behavior for the good of the group as a whole.
Now this may seem obvious, but apparently it has escaped the notice of my dear friend Harlock.
Harlock would have us believe that rules are rules only as long as they're nice ones. Ones that make everyone feel 'comfortable' or 'special' or just plain old 'loved.'
I am referring to his recent railings against the current administration for dismissing two Arabic translators from the army for being homosexual.
Firstly, let me clarify a couple of points.
The so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy has been in place a lot longer than the current administration has been in power. Now we all know that Mr. Clinton was a full, red-blooded American male, and Lord knows he liked to prove it to the staff whenever he got the chance, but if it was really such anathema to the liberal voters who kept slick Willy in power, don't you think he might have done something about it? Attempting to tar the current administration as being especially anti-homosexual is simply not facing facts.
The second point is that the current administration *didn't* fire the two men. The army did. Now I *suppose* the government of Mr. Bush could have tried to intervene and protect their jobs, but I can't begin to imagine what sort of precedent that would have set. Of course, President Bush is nominally the commander in chief, but I suspect, and I could be wrong here, that he's not involved in the day-to-day staffing issues of the millions of government employees.
These men understood the rules. They fully acknowledge that they knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it anyway. The people they worked with knew they were homosexuals. They knew they were a couple. No one cared; because they were good at their jobs and frankly, everyone has better things to worry about than the preferences of their colleagues. But they crossed a line and broke a cardinal rule : don't get caught having sex on the base. It's simple enough. Not hard to understand, but amazingly they did it anyway.
Now you can argue until you're blue in the face that it's a bad rule, or that it's discriminatory. Personally, I don't think army personnel should be having sex on army bases regardless of their preferences in partner. In any case, like it or not they knew the rule and they choose, knowingly, to break it. They have absolutely no one to blame for their dismissal but themselves. Until the rules are changed, you would expect that people in the army of all places would understand the need to live by them.
In doing what they did, they not only lost their own jobs, but they again gave ammunition to the very people who seek to make being homosexual a dismissible offense. Inevitably, those people are saying, "look, gay men can't control themselves. If you let them in the army, see what happens?"
It doesn't matter that it's nonsense. It doesn't matter that it's bigoted and silly. All those two men did was foolishly flaunt rules they knew better than to break and in doing so they set back the cause of those enlightened individuals who happen to think sexual orientation is no-one's business, period.
Here's a wild idea Harlock: how about blaming the men who broke the rules for their own dismissal, instead of yet again playing the game of 'blame the government, everyone else is really just a victim'?