The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Peter Pace, has his priorities in order:
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday he considers homosexuality to be immoral and the military should not condone it by allowing gay personnel to serve openly, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Marine Gen. Peter Pace likened homosexuality to adultery, which he said was also immoral, the newspaper reported on its Web site.
“I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way,” Pace told the newspaper in a wide-ranging interview.
Pace, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and a 1967 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, said he based his views on his upbringing.
Oh, goodness! It’s based on his upbringing! Well, of course then! You know what, my folks brought me up to believe that if a man or woman is willing to shoulder a rifle, to stand post, to wear the uniform, well… it doesn’t much matter who they sleep with.
Here’s my favorite bit:
The newspaper said Pace did not address concerns raised by a 2005 government audit that showed some 10,000 troops, including more than 50 specialists in Arabic, have been discharged because of the policy. [emphasis mine]
These guys, I tell you. It’s like they want to lose the war.
UPDATE (–Goldy):
Gen. Pace’s statements are ripe for ridicule, but Will missed an opportunity to zero in on the most ridiculous statement of them all:
Marine Gen. Peter Pace likened homosexuality to adultery, which he said was also immoral,
I can’t seem to find “Thou shall not take it up the ass” anywhere in the Ten Commandments, but I’m surprised Gen. Pace missed this particular moral proscription: “Thou shall not kill.”
Hmm. Homosexuality is immoral, but apparently, the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a preemptive war of aggression is not. A soldier openly loving another man… that is a sin. But a soldier unavoidably inflicting “collateral damage” — killing men, women and children — that is not.
I fully understand that the Seventh Commandment is only a prohibition against illegal killing, and that the morality of war is a complicated and nuanced subject. But I find it ironic that a man whose job it is to turn teenage boys into killers would claim to possess such moral clarity on issues of human sexuality.