I touched on this attempt at censorship recently, but I thought it deserved more attention, even though it isn't outrageous so much as ridiculous:
Somehow, things like this seem to originate on the right side of the aisle. Maybe it has to do with -- well, I don't know what it has to do with. I suppose it really has to do with our Puritan heritage -- you know, spy on the neighbors to see if they're doing something you disapprove of. And, of course, control what they read. From Army Times:
“Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” said Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., unveiling his House bill April 16.
His Military Honor and Decency Act would amend a provision of the 1997 Defense Authorization Act that banned sales of “sexually explicit material” on military bases.
The new language would “close existing loopholes” in regulations to bring the military “into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law,” Broun said.
“Allowing sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes, feeding a base addiction, eroding the family as the primary building block of society, and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad,” Broun said.
Mmm -- how many moral waivers has the Army been issuing? Oh, excuse me -- that's not about real morality. Real morality is not allowing people to have access to Playboy and Penthouse. Seriously. After all, we don't want federal money supporting those publications:
Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system’s largely self-funded operations.
But Broun’s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved — “used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,” he said.
How shaky is that? I have news for Rep. Broun -- when the soldiers put their pay in their pockets, it's not taxpayer money any more. It's theirs. They can spend it any way they want. (A number of the commenters to the article agree with me.)
I wonder what Rep. Broun's reaction would be if the PX was selling Drummer or Inches. Cardiac arrest, probably. Just wait until DADT is repealed.
(Footnote: The comments to the Army Times article are not particularly sympathetic to Rep. Broun, and bring up many of the same points I did, with the added one of separation of church and state. You have to hand it to the troops -- they're a lot more clear-eyed than our Congress.)
And I really think that people like Rep. Broun should spend some time worrying about the real problems the troops are having. Like suicide. From CBS:
Beyond the individual loss, it turns out little information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military. There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide.
"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total," Bowman said.
Why do the families think that is?
"Because they don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known," Lucey said.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.
"If you're just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves who've committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,” Murray said.
CBS News’ investigative unit wanted the numbers, so it submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense asking for the numbers of suicides among all service members for the past 12 years.
Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.
CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health.
"There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem," he said.
Why hasn't the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?
"That research is ongoing,” he said.
It turns out that Katz was trying to cover his ass:
"There is no epidemic in suicide in VA," Katz told Keteyian in November.
But in this e-mail to his top media advisor, written two months ago, Katz appears to be saying something very different, stating: "Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our metical (sic) facilities."
Katz's email was written shortly after the VA provided CBS News data showing there were only 790 attempted suicides in all 2007 - a fraction of Katz's estimate. . . .
And it appears that Katz went out of his way to conceal these numbers.
First, he titled his e-mail: "Not for the CBS News Interview Request."
He opened it with "Shh!" - as in keep it quiet - before ending with
"Is this something we should (carefully) address ... before someone stumbles on it?"
This is the head of the Veteran's Administration's mental health division.
Or maybe their stateside housing deserves some attention. This video depicts the condition of the housing at Fort Bragg for a unit that just came back from 15 months in Afghanistan:
When you watch that video, do the words "a high quality of life for Service members and their families" spring to your lips? Mine either.
If there are $3.2 billion dollars' worth of repairs that are even more urgent than these -- $3.2 billion that has to be spent repairing houses that are literally toxic, or might explode or collapse -- then we should probably think seriously about firing everyone involved in military housing and starting from scratch.
And this is really scary -- the conversion of the Army to Christian soldiers:
One of the darkest developments of many dark developments in the Bush years has been the slow ascent of Christianism as a core value of the military. The promotion of Christianists throughout the armed services, the insistence by the president that no public institution be regarded as a place where religion should be silent, clear discrimination against Jews and atheists in military educational institutions: the possibility of a secular military dedicated to defending all Americans regardless of their faith or lack of it has been called into question under the current administration. The resilience of the ban on gays - while the military has granted a record number of waivers to criminals - can only be understood if one sees the US military as an increasingly religious institution at this point, and not a rational secular one. The latest story of an atheist soldier being threatened by superiors is believable in this context. Volokh has details from the complaint.
Here's Volokh's post, and please note the first comment. This is the really scary part:
I would argue that the presence of atheists in the military is vulnerable to that very same argument. Never mind the question of whether an atheist can feel any genuine loyalty to a Christian nation, given that he rejects the core principles on which our nation was built; never mind the unlikelihood that someone who denies an afterlife would sacrifice his own life for any reason, instead of cutting and running like John Kerry; never mind the fact that atheism correlates with all manner of other moral degeneracies. . . .
And it goes downhill from there.
Fortunately, most of the other commenters ripped that one to shreds (although one advances the idea that he/she is a troll).
It's not universal yet -- the Navy seems to be holding its own.
In light of the Air Force Academy scandal (not all that long ago, if you remember), the seven Army brass who appeared in a Christianist propaganda piece filmed in the Pentagon (without repercussions), Gen. "My God is bigger than his god" Boykin and the like, I'd say it's a real problem.
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