photo: TheOtherPete via Flickr

The split on the issue of equality for gay citizens is very clearly a generational one. Sure there are those in my generation and even in Generation Y that hold bigoted views but they are the minority of these groups. The flip side is true for the Boomers and those who are older than them. It can be starkly seen by the recent article in The Daily Caller (founded by the previously bow-tied Tucker Carlson) claiming that the military can fix its DADT policy by forbidding gay men to serve but allowing lesbian women to serve.

The premise is that when all these poor lesbian women are with only straight men it would give them the convert them to straight. From the original article which has been since changed:

my solution would get the distaff part of our homosexual population off our collective ‘Broke Back,’ thus giving straight male GIs a fair shot at converting lesbians and bringing them into the mainstream.

Converting them?!? How exactly? Well this paragraph from earlier in the post gives us a good idea:

Women had to be more selective because, then as now, the principal consequences of copulation were theirs: pregnancy; childbirth; most of the responsibilities of childrearing whilst their baby-daddy hunter-gatherers were about hunting and gathering and finding other women to subdue; and the ruination of their pulchritudinous figures. How our ancient foremothers ever managed to establish any choice in the matter is utterly beyond me when one considers that they did not have access to Mace, police whistles, Lady Smith .38s, or domestic violence hotlines.

Mr. Rehyansky seems to think that given the female soldiers would be surrounded by straight male soldiers things would go the way they did in the ancient past. They would be “subdued” and converted to heterosexuality.

Rehyansky is a nut, but he is a nut that gets a lot of play on the Right. He has written for American Spectator, National Review and Human Events. The trilogy of Rightwing “thought”. It is telling that someone who is supposed to be one of the thinkers in the conservative movement is willing to, at the very least, tacitly endorse rape as a way to change the sexuality of gay female soldiers. It is the old straight guy call that lesbians just haven’t had a real man, and that is why they are attracted to women.

This has always made me nuts. It is a twofer for the right, because as long as they believe a woman could be changed to heterosexuality by a man, or man by a woman then it really is all about choice and not about biology. This, of course, ignores the fact that straight people don’t choose their sexuality, and the problem that if it is a choice why in the world would anyone ever choose that much trouble for sex? Right now we do not have equal rights for gay citizens, but there are places in the world where you can be imprisoned or executed for it. No one would ever pick something which would possibly get them killed if there were another choice.

I am not one to hope for anyone’s death, but I think when the generation that Mr. Rehyansky belongs to shuffles off this mortal coil, we will all be in a better place. For now we have to live with citizens who cavalierly propose rape as a solution to a discriminatory policy in the military.

There is a bit of sunshine in this tale of woe, by running these kinds of articles Carlson’s effort at a reputable news website are circling the bowl. It is clear they know they have a problem as the current version of the article does not have the implicate rape idea, it was cut after Amanda Hess and others pointed it out. Carlson, like most of the establishment on the Right is riding a tiger of bigotry and inchoate anger. Sure the nut jobs pay the bills but any deviation form the mobs line is going to result in them leaving. Since the Daily Caller could not attract a wider audience they went hard right. Now they are left with the choice of cashing any and all credibility they might have had or being left with no audience at all.

I think that is the poetic justice. Here’s a hope that they get both, no audience and no credibility. If sites like that start to go away, I will not shed a tear. I’ll take hero’s like Lt Col. Fehrenbach and Lt. Dan Choi any day over old assholes who think rape is something that can be bandied about as a policy option.

The floor is yours.