Gays, Reporters, and Other Threats to Our Armed Forces

Plus: the great fashion crime perpetrated against our navy.

Sun Media’s Peter Worthington stands resolutely on the wrong side of history and laments the repeal of the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “It’s hard to see how changing the [policy] will affect homosexual individuals who want to serve in the military,” he writes. Oh really? Well let’s clear that up right now then: it will affect them by ensuring won’t lose their jobs if anyone finds out they’re gay. True, Worthington admits most NATO countries “allow gays to serve in the military with no apparent ill-effects — though this is somewhat uncertain, given NATO’s reluctance to share in the fighting in Afghanistan.” He’s either implying that a bunch of sissy gay soldiers are stopping NATO from fighting more vigorously, or that a larger war would somehow expose homosexual soldiers as a military liability. Either way, completely baseless.

In a follow up to her newspaper’s feature on the attack in Afghanistan last year that killed five Canadians including an embedded reporter, the Globe and Mail’s Lysiane Gagnon makes the case against embedding. “[T]he Taliban are not stupid,” she writes. “They know that the death of a journalist, especially a female journalist, will have a much greater media impact in the West than the death of a professional soldier.” The precision with which the Taliban carried out the attack that killed reporter Michelle Lang (they seemed to know which armored vehicle she was in) suggests that being seen with reporters greatly increases the risk to soldiers.

In the Toronto Star, Senator Joseph Day rails against the fact that the Royal Canadian Navy’s name was changed to the Maritime Command in 1968. To Day’s great relief the green uniforms that went along with the name change have been replaced by blue uniforms, and the “executive curl” has been returned to their sleeves, thank goodness. The argument he makes to reinstate the Royal Canadian Navy moniker is probably important to somebody, somewhere, but most Canadians might find his piece a more persuasive argument for drastic senate reform, if debating military fashion choices is the kind of thing senators spend their time doing. Maybe Day should figure out how to stop his colleagues from robbing taxpayers blind instead?