Miguel De La Torre on ending DADT
Nice to see this kind of editorial in a Baptist paper — but look how predictable the comments are….
Associated Baptist Press - Opinion: Truly supporting our troops.
We Christians should be against all forms of deception, and yet, in an attempt to impose mandatory heterosexuality, we force many of our men and women in uniform to deceive their fellow soldiers. Besides the immorality of forcing our troops to lie, the present policy is placing them and our nation in greater peril. Since the policy was enacted in 1993, almost 800 specialists with critical skills needed for the defense of the homeland have been fired, of whom 323 are linguists — 55 of them Arabic experts. Think of the backlog of thousands of documents that cannot be translated — documents that, conceivably, could save American lives — because we are more concerned with whom a soldier loves than we are with his or her ability to do their job.
(Though I have to admit that I think the first commenter has a point about Christians and militarism. I don’t know if defensive campaigns are compatible with Christianity, but I do know that the early church kicked out people who joined the military. And even if defensive campaigns are okay (I think of the Israelites re-building the city wall with a sword in their free hands), I do not believe for one second that our actions in Iraq were justified in God’s eyes.)
