The Pace Policy

Alerted to the exchange reported at Pam's House Blend by Andrew Sullivan:

Corey Andrew had his profile and resume posted at Careerbuilder.com, and it caught the eye of Army recruiter Marcia Ramode, who contacted him. He wasn't interested in a position in the military, particularly because of the ban on gays and lesbians in the military.

When Andrew informed Ramode that he is gay, and believed that the DADT policy was wrong, the two engaged in a three-day email exchange that included statements by Ramode, in her official capacity as a recruiter, that boggle the mind.

The e-mails from an Army recruiter are not something I'm going to post here. I'm the only one allowed to call names on this site, and I never get this low.

Interestingly enough, Sullivan doesn't comment on this as reported by the ever clueless Dan Riehl:

Read the whole email exchange via the pdf, you'll see that Powell aka Andrew was being inappropriate and looking for a fight from the start - bragging about how he and his gay male, pierced-nippled friends would do a better job than the current soldiers. In typical feckless Liberal fashion, he started a silly flame war and now he wants to turn it around and be some whinny victim hounded by gay oppression. Gay, or not, it's pretty clear he has nothing to offer the military. He'd be crying for a lawyer if he ever really came under attack.

Uh, hey Dan? Your partisan's hanging out.

If you read the whole exchange (pdf), it's true that Corey Andrew was being a little bitchy. Frankly, I would probably take the same opportunity to confront a member of the military over this policy, although I'd probably limit myself to a little bit of snark -- after all, she didn't make the policy. But just look at the tone and the content of Ramode's e-mails compared to Andrew's -- not only homophobic but racist, and extremely so, and this coming from an American Indian in her professional capacity as an Army recruiter.

Riehl's attempt to build "context" here is also pretty much irrelevant, and strikes me as being nothing more than a tactic to deflect the onus to the victim. (He's also guilty of some sloppy reading -- he attributes things to Andrew that Andrew didn't write, or mis-reports them, but I suspect that's just part of the tactic.) Let's face it, Ramode had a number of options. She could just have restated the policy and noted that her duty is to carry it out. She could have broken off the exchange before starting the name-calling. She could have just said, "I'm sorry you feel that way" and let it go at that. And the point is, she's the one who initiated the exchange, and she's on duty. Reading Andrew's first response, it's obvious (to me at least) that she was dealing with a pissy queen. Best just let it go, in my opinion.

To be sure, Andrew came up with some comments that were totally out of line. I can feel some sympathy -- under the category of "things you wanted to say" -- but that's the whole point: they are things you might have wanted to say but didn't because you're too dignified and have too much self-respect for that. So he was wrong on that score. However, in what seems to have become a contest on who could be more offensive, Ramode wins hands down.

The point that's most relevant here, aside from the nastiness of Ramode's e-mails, is that she was communicating in her official capacity as a representative of the US Army. In the nuts-and-bolts sense, she was using her government e-mail to make racist and homophobic attacks (under some degree of provocation, as amply demonstrated) on a potential recruit whom she had first approached, but the larger issue is that she is a walking, talking, e-mailing example of Army policy toward gays.

Shall we measure the ick factor here? Thank you so much, General Pace.

(PS -- It's very interesting reading the comments at both Dan Riehl's post and at Pam Spaulding's. Just take a run down them for a compare-and-contrast view of "the hateful left" as opposed to "the patriotic right.")

Update:

Here's a report by Steve Ralls from SLDN with some follow-up.