Abu Muqawama has great fun calling Mac Owens a “hot tranny mess” after the dude inexplicably uses the example of the Greeks to argue against gays in the military. And I won’t pretend to be too mature to not find that hilarious. But I want to take issue with this assumption of Owens’, because it’s instructive:

Winning the nation’s wars is the military’s functional imperative. Indeed, it is the only reason for a liberal society to maintain a military organization. War is terror. War is confusion. War is characterized by chance, uncertainty and friction. …
Accordingly, the military stresses such martial virtues as courage, both physical and moral, a sense of honor and duty, discipline, a professional code of conduct, and loyalty. It places a premium on such factors as unit cohesion and morale. The glue of the military ethos is what the Greeks called philia—friendship, comradeship or brotherly love. Philia, the bond among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together, is the source of the unit cohesion that most research has shown to be critical to battlefield success.

Quite so, and it’s a subject Owens knows much better than I do. But from the company commanders I know — who are fighting the nations’ wars right now and not 40 years ago — this is exactly why they elect not to enforce DADT in their companies. What they care about is the mission, and the competence of their men and women to accomplish it. They do not turn away good soldiers and Marines who are gay. Owens’ case presumes that gays lack the self-control necessary to professional soldiering. That’s an untenable argument, disproven in an instant by men such as Lt. Dan Choi and thousands like him.

I would also like to see Owens explain to the Israelis, the British, the Danes, the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Canadians, the Italians, the French and all other countries that allow open gay military service why their militaries are subpar.

If the mission is what matters, then sexual orientation doesn’t. It’s instructive that the people who have trouble understanding this are all from an earlier generation.