Will ROTC be able to pass the campus “literacy test”?

When Glenn linked my post about whether incest is banned in the military, he not only made my post look funnier that I had thought it was, he reminded me of an obvious irony:

IF NOT, RESTORING ROTC TO COLUMBIA WILL JUST BE THAT MUCH EASIER: “Does anyone know whether the Code of Military Justice prohibits incest?”

Unfortunately, regardless of whether there’s a military ban on incest (or homosexuality, or anything else), I’m afraid that the ROTC will remain banned.

I have never believed that DADT was the reason for the ROTC ban. It was simply a convenient excuse — and a dishonest one at that, because DADT was not the military’s own policy, but an act of Congress.

Congress told the military to discriminate against gays.

Which means that had these universities wanted to be consistent, they should have also banned Congressional recruiting on campus..

I remember getting into debates with leftist friends back in the days of the original hubbub over gays in the military in the early 90s, and it always struck me that they were against the military more than they were for gays. That a patriotic gay man might sincerely want to serve his country struck them as silly, even pathetic, as their thinking was “why would anyone want to serve in the military?” It seemed quite obvious to me that they were deeply anti-military, and were only supporting gays in the military as a way thumb their noses at the military.

To understand how outrageous and condescending this is, try putting yourself for a moment in the position of being a patriotic gay man. (Yes, there are such things.) Your so-called “friends” on the left claim to be supportive your right to serve in the military that they hate, and it gradually creeps up on you that they see you as a sort of leftist ally — to be supported and used as a pawn in furtherance of their goal of degrading the military.

It’s pretty sickening.

Anyway, the left hates the military just as much now as they did then. And if I am right in my speculation and they were using DADT as a convenient excuse to kick ROTC off campus, they’ll find another excuse. Who knows what it will be? Maybe some “terrorist training camp” they don’t like in Fort Benning, maybe “human rights abuses” at Guantanamo. And of course there’s always “torture.”

They will find something, because they are anti-military bigots, and finding something to hold against the military is what anti-military bigots do. Like many bigots, they claim that they are not bigoted, but just following their rules.

Speaking of bigots who claim not to be bigoted, I am reminded of the many stories from the Civil Rights era about the use of “literacy tests” to deny blacks the right to vote. These “tests” were not designed to test literacy, but were simply a ruse in which bigoted clerks came up with clever ways to disenfranchise black voters while officially denying that they were bigoted. A black applicant might, for example, be asked to construe a page of Chaucer. Or (as in the case of an apocryphal story which I was amazed to find online) to read and translate from a Chinese newspaper:

…my favorite example of using the law to discriminate is the story of the old black man who showed up to vote when the ‘Jim Crow’ laws were still in effect. The ‘law’ said voters had to demonstrate they could read.

The poll worker asked the black gentleman if he could read. The black gentleman said yes. The poll worker shoved a newspaper across the table and demanded the man read it.

It was written in Chinese.

The gentleman said I caint read that but I can tell you what it says.

Oh yeah, what’s that? the poll worker replied.

The gentleman responded, It says, “Ain’t no black man gonna vote here today.”

Similarly, ain’t no ROTC gonna be allowed at Columbia either!