Sodomy and the lash, according to Winston Churchill, were the outstanding features of the British Royal Navy. The United States Navy will be at least half-British, if the American courts have their way. The homosexuals’ battle plan to gain acceptance, which includes taking dates to the Officer’s Club, now involves 100 or so discrimination claims or lawsuits against the government. Their key argument, of course, is that forbidding a homosexual to serve is a violation of his civil rights. A corollary to the rights claim is that sexual orientation is not a reliable indicator of behavior, meaning that a declared homosexual may not necessarily practice what he preaches. Lawyers for the homosexual movement adopted the orientation-does-not-equal-behavior tactic only after the Supreme Court, in 1986, upheld Georgia’s sodomy law by deciding the Constitution did not create a right to privacy to commit sodomy.

The case of Joseph Steffan v. the Government, the one case in which a court of law said homosexuals are not endowed with a “right to serve,” shows what the Clinton administration has in mind for the military. Just before graduating from the Naval Academy, Steffan made the mistake of divulging his preference to a friend. Notwithstanding its ludicrous position on women, the Navy still officially frowns on sodomy. Steffan left Annapolis without graduating. He sued, won, then lost an appeal.

Retired Marine Colonel Ron Ray, on behalf of the Naval Aviation Foundation and Institute for Media Education, filed the amicus brief that sunk Steffan’s suit. Using excerpts from My Country, My Right to Serve, a book lionizing queers in uniform, the brief details Steffan’s sexual activities, shooting a hole through the argument that one’s desires are not a reliable indicator of how one will act.

IME’s Judith Reisman, a feisty grandmother and valiant crusader against sexual deviance, analyzed Steffan’s interview with the author of the book and helped Ray pull back the sheets on the homosexual agenda. Steffan, she wrote, “engages in risky sex with anonymous AIDS-productive partners. . . . He copulates . . . without any control, as an animal in heat . . . [He is] the prototypical profile of the homosexual male. . . . His sex drive i s . . . a large enough part of his identity that he risked destroying his own Naval career. . . . If Mr. Steffan would risk all for . . . anonymous sex, what else would one expect him to risk, when it would involve another’s life?”

The brief’s appendices are full of excerpts, again, thanks to Reisman, from publications such as The Advocate, the leading homosexual “newsmagazine.” The magazine’s “special issue” on military men, for instance, was quite open about the erotopathic obsession of homosexuals for men in uniform: “Picture a bare-chested young sailor in his whiter-than-white (and tighter-than-tight) bellbottoms, working up a sweat as he swabs the deck. Kind of makes you break out in a sweat too, doesn’t it. And war may be hell, but it’s also sexy as hell when you’ve got three hot, dirty soldiers crammed into a foxhole made for one.” Not surprisingly, seducing military men is a staple of homosexual pornography and personal advertisements.

Ray also revealed the two key sources of information for the Pentagon’s study that concluded homosexuals were not a security risk: the editor of Paidika: The Journal of Paedophiha, and the famous “sexologist” Dr. John Money, an advocate of pedophilia. (One of the most damaging Soviet spies found working for an American intelligence agency was a pedophile blackmailed by Soviet agents. and it is no surprise that of the Army’s 102 punitive separations for homosexuality between 1988 and 1992, 47 percent involved child molestation.) In My Country, My Right to Serve, where Steffan spilled the beans, we learn that the military “is heaven for a gay person.”

Obviously, Ray argued to the United States Court of Appeals, orientation is a reliable indicator of future behavior, just as any other “orientation” would be. As Ray says, homosexuals “want you to believe that someone who calls himself a golfer, someone who owns clubs and shoes, is no more likely to play golf then someone who isn’t a golfer.”

Of course, the military has no legitimate need, such as a shortage of manpower, for homosexuals to serve. But even if there were, so what? The argument against homosexuals openly serving in the military doesn’t turn on practicality. It turns on standards of decency and morality. Ray drew part of his winning argument in the Steffan ease from John Adams’ two-century-old military dictum, which Congress incorporated into the Uniform Code of Military Justice. An iron-clad law, it directs commanders to set examples of honor and virtue and to “suppress all dissolute, immoral and disorderly practices.” That fundamental doctrine, Ray says, means President Clinton’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is illegal.

But that won’t matter. Spineless members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have implemented President Clinton’s illegal order, Ray rightly observes, because “loyalty to an administration and its policies [have become more] important than loyalty and responsibility to [an officer’s] own command.” Instead, they tell officers disturbed by the new regime that they should resign. The Secretary of the Navy recently even decorated one of the more prominent homosexuals who still wears the uniform of his country. As for Janet Reno’s Justice Department, which is supposed to defend military policy, its lawyers simply don’t call witnesses who would support a case to exclude homosexuals. Rumors about Reno’s own sexual orientation have long been rife, but in any event her lawyers purposely lose, which is why the courts have torn up the discharge papers of so many homosexuals.

Ray concludes it is “no exaggeration to say that moral principle may never again be decisive in a public debate.” True, but then again, military and political leaders who would even discuss subjecting soldiers to degradation and disease have already declared moral bankruptcy.