Now, the most obvious thing that will jump out at the reader here is that MAC OWENS IS USING ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE AS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST (!!!) GAYS IN COMBAT. This is, obviously and not just for those of us who majored in classics, hilarious.
It strikes me that Owens, William Kristol and their ilk seem to have this weird 1950s idea of gays -- especially men, since they tend to ignore lesbians as being merely "women" -- as somehow frail, insubstantial creatures, unable to stand up to the rigors military service, which is for "real men." Nor does Kristol seem to have much respect for the "real men" -- read "heterosexuals" -- in the field:
Here's his pathetic response to the core question:
Advocates of repeal will say sexual orientation is irrelevant to military performance in a way these attributes are not. But this is not clearly true given the peculiar characteristics of military service.
I presume he means that he thinks that straight servicemembers would be traumatized by having to serve alongside gay servicemembers because they harbor absurd fears that they will be sexually harassed or even "assaulted", as his ally Tony Perkins recently asserted.
Owens seems to have the same take. There's some deep cognitive dissonance there -- on the one hand, we're too likely to faint under fire; on the other, we're too aggressive toward our fellows. Strangely enough, I went through high school and college gym classes, and especially swim classes, in which we were nude except for caps, without ever assaulting one of my classmates in the shower or locker room. Given the number of female servicemembers who have been sexually assaulted by their hetereosexual male comrades, do I see a little bit of projection here?
Two points about this attitude: in this country, you'd better believe that any gay boy who survives adolescence is tough. And, as far as Owens and his "philia" and "eros" and how the one is necessary and the other makes military service impossible, has the man never heard of the Sacred Band of Thebes?
The Sacred Band originally was formed of picked men in couples, each lover and beloved selected from the ranks of the existing Theban citizen-army. The pairs consisted of the older "heniochoi", or charioteers, and the younger "paraibatai", or companions, who were all housed and trained at the city's expense. . . .
After the Theban general Pelopidas recaptured the acropolis of Thebes in 379 BCE, he assumed command of the Sacred Band, in which he fought alongside his good friend Epaminondas. It was Pelopidas who formed these couples into a distinct unit: he "never separated or scattered them, but would stand [them with himself in] the brunt of battle, using them as one body."[5] They became, in effect, the "special forces" of Greek soldiery[6], and the forty years of their known existence (378–338 BCE) marked the pre-eminence of Thebes as a military and political power in late-classical Greece.
The Sacred Band under Pelopidas fought the Spartans[7] at Tegyra in 375 BCE, vanquishing an army that was at least three times its size. It was also responsible for the victory at Leuctra in 371 BCE, called by Pausanias the most decisive battle ever fought by Greeks against Greeks. Leuctra established Theban independence from Spartan rule and laid the groundwork for the expansion of Theban power, but possibly also for Philip II's eventual victory. . . .
Defeat came at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BCE), the decisive contest in which Philip II of Macedon, with his son Alexander, extinguished the Theban hegemony. Alexander became the first to break through the Band's line,[8] which had hitherto been thought invincible. The traditional hoplite infantry was no match for the novel long-speared Macedonian phalanx: the Theban army and its allies broke and fled, but the Sacred Band, although surrounded and overwhelmed, refused to surrender. It held its ground and fell where it stood. Plutarch records that Philip II, on encountering the corpses "heaped one upon another", understanding who they were, exclaimed,
Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything unseemly.
But then, maybe that's what they're afraid of.
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