DADT, Christine O'donnell and the First Amendment

Of course, being intelligent, well educated citizens, MeanMesa visitors know exactly what the First Amendment says about the question of church and state.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The problem is that most of us have been thoroughly drenched with a rather seriously biased version for the entire period of our civic consciousness. Both the US citizens and the government have suspiciously charged the duty of explaining the thing to folks with a definite "dog in the fight."

Naturally, in such an important mission many judicial experts with a deeply founded understanding of the amendment taught the law school classes and argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court, and so on.  However, there also appeared another bunch of self-evolved "experts," eager to "assist" in  the education of voters desiring to understand the concept.

Here, we mean the multi-shaded hordes of religionists.  From their pulpits these pastors and priests vindicated their piety with urgent admonitions to congregations not to lynch Jews and Catholics, and more modernly, Muslims.  So much for that.

These "sermons" of theirs usually incorporated a craftily manufactured sense of long-suffering tolerance of victims from other, slightly different, contemporary religionist franchises.  The mythology of the prevailing franchise certainly encouraged a congregation's  general impulse to "convert" the fallen into sin saturated, dues paying members of the choir, but the more traditional idea of performing that "evangelical service" at the point of a sword was usually, quite judiciously, considered to be simply "too yesterday."

Now we come to the DADT (Don't Ask, Don't Tell) question.  The policy fails miserably as a legitimate military command -- it enjoys none of the validating criteria from the usual military considerations of effectivity, readiness and the like.  Instead, the concept is founded on the conceptual debris lingering in the minds of soldiers who, even in many cases unknowingly, have been contaminated with certain aspects of the ancient fairy tale, you know, "Sunday School Graduates."

In the far ranging desire to make homophobia -- and, consequently,  DADT, somewhat more palatable and relevant, literally hordes of coaches, comedians, comatose fathers and other collaborators desiring to painlessly inflate their own undeveloped -- and secretly vacillating -- masculine identities have joined the "dirty shirt preachers" in the effort.

The question is simple. In a more rational world where combining wool and cotton does not invoke a sentence of being stoned, would this grotesque construct of ancient, tribal, vaginal authority still mean anything?  The frank answer is, of course, "No."

So, how did a blurb from an ancient fairy tale become such a widely practiced and fully lawful judicial policy in such an otherwise very successfully pragmatic institution?

OOOOPS!  Could it have come from the Unconstitutional Establishment of Religion by our government in open violation of the First Amendment?  Still quaking?  How exactly does a several thousands of years old tribal tradition from a bunch of Middle Eastern Arabs wind up as a fully enforced statute in the Uniformed Code of Military Justice?

Rolling forward to the matter of "I am not a witch and I want to be a Senator" Christine O'Donnell, in deference to human decency, we must restrain our lower impulse to simply add to the freak show.  Still, her most recent gaff in debate comments concerning the First Amendment (Google: O'Donnell/separation of church and state/First Amendment... or Washington Post), she is clearly unable to follow the peanuts here.

From the Washington Post article

Ugggh!  Finally, this posting has, actually and materially, touched all the elements of its title!

Enough said. 

Comic relief?  Sure -- it's time to watch the ranting and raving of all "them straa-a-a-ht thinkin' Suthun Sentors what's Defendah's of thu Faith!"  

Yup.  Just leave it to the real men and ignore the man (the Senator) behind the curtain in the next stall.  Maybe he can vindicate all those unfair accusations of oblique psycho-sexual mischief, placing the origin of his embrrassing peccadillo at the foot of a wet dream about Miss O'Donnell.  Thankfully, for all the faux-homophobe neo-cons still trying to "fly the flag" on the issue, DADT was never intended to be applied to the Senate.