Comments on: James Kushiner: Military and Monastics

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 21:08:49 +0000

Christopher: I don't know about the USAF, but at least in Canadian jurisprudence, we are not talking about feeling a little tipsy after a drink or two, but about being so utterly wasted you literally cannot consent (whether passed out completely or substantially unable to understand the nature of what is going on). In other words, not "better call a cab", but "whats a cab where am i who are you" (lack of punctuation intentional). Michael:

... There are a lot of counterfeit chastities in the world but they need not give real chastity a bad name. They just need to be recognized for what they are. One of the false chastities is the identification of it as solely sexual and coercive in itself as in the chastity belt which is a form of rape IMO.

Thank you! Before I converted to Orthodoxy I was only familiar with "chastity" in this false sense, and no one had properly articulated to me the correct sense you describe (and I never thought to ask, forgive me) until this comment. This is going to save me so much doublethink and unease when reading the Fathers, etc. when they praise this virtue.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 17:38:25 +0000

The law says that she could not have consented since she was inebriated and therefore it was sexual assault. It does not matter if the man was inebriated or not for his defense.

Wow! That seems to be to so obviously wrong that such a “law” had to have been written with a hot coal from hell . When you say “law”, do you mean administrative government and/or air force “law” or do you mean actual legislative (it would be state by state right?) criminal “law”?

By: Toby Grubbs

Toby Grubbs — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 14:06:32 +0000

I retired from the USAF in 2007. The Air Force seemed to be at war with sexual assault constantly. I always wondered why the sexual assault rate never seemed to improve after spending millions of dollars and man-hours on it. I finally realized that the Air Force was fighting the wrong battle. Most of the sexual assaults reported (in the Air Force) seemed to involve 2 very drunk individuals. Neither remembers much at all, but the woman reports sexually assault after waking up next to a man she did not want to have sex with when she was sober. The law says that she could not have consented since she was inebriated and therefore it was sexual assault. It does not matter if the man was inebriated or not for his defense. The man’s career and life are ruined, and her reputation causes fear and destroys cohesion within the unit. The Department of Defense has inadvertently regulated the inequality of women in uniform, and the criminality of being male. I believe that many of the same-sex sexual assaults probably happen like this, even though many are mostly likely perverse acts to impose dominance and/or punishment over another they consider weak.

If the DoD were to enforce rules about drinking and fraternization between the men and women in uniform, they would see a drastic fall in sexual assault reports. In short…they need to return to a policy of promoting personal responsibility, military bearing (even when out of uniform), and tighten the noose on alcohol use/abuse. IMHO

By: Michael Bauman

Michael Bauman — Wed, 20 May 2015 19:02:36 +0000

In reply to Gregory Manning.

Gregory, you give my words more strictness than I meant them. I was responding to Mr Bradshaw’s comment that rape was not a sexual crime put a crime of power and control. There is certainly a significant element of the power/control motivation in many rapes and it should not be dismissed out of hand. Thus, I was partially agreeing with him and still reaching for the deeper motivation for rapes which is a depraved sexuality in a larger sense. The depth of the sexual depravity and hatred that rapists demonstrate may not be one that is easily identified with lust as we usually think of it. There is no simple or even obvious sexual interest per say.

Sex is supposed to be a vehicle of fecundity and communion. To twist to its opposite, degradation, violence and death, is evil. It is a lust that goes beyond simple sexual desire run rampant. It is unfortunately quite easy to reinterpret sexual depravity by over simplifying the problem and not looking deeply enough.

The sexual assault(s) of which I have the most direct knowledge involved a man I thought a friend. Over many years he systematically sexually assaulted his own daughters (4) starting around age 5 and going to puberty. His ex-wife is still a friend and she has told me since that all of her children (6) were conceived by what can only be described as spousal rape. The man is no doubt sexually perverted in many deep ways, yet at the depth of that depravity is an incredible hatred (which I got to see in an unguarded moment). His essential motivation was to terrorize. I have no doubt that he does not have any genuine human feelings, even lust, at all because he has given himself over to demonic rage. He’s scary. He is not in jail

Actually IMO because rapes cannot be tied simply or solely to lust actually makes them more heinous, not less since such crimes damage even destroy both body and soul.

Thank you for making your point. I needed to expand my thought.

By: Gregory Manning

Gregory Manning — Wed, 20 May 2015 02:48:53 +0000

Michael,
Please re-read what you wrote in the fourth sentence. There’s “no direct causality linking lust with sexual assault or sexual depravity…”? If sexual assault doesn’t arise out of lust I don’t know what does. That’s why it’s called sexual assault. By the same token, sexual assault is sexual depravity. The remarks of the JAG cited in James’ comment are, in the immortal words of Bill Clinton, “a bunch of hooey”!
James is correct about one thing. Homosexuals are highly unlikely to be perpetrating sexual assault on straight men. It’s the other way around. Straight men, in the military or in prison, see homosexuals as deficient in their masculinity; they’re not real men, and therefore do not deserve respect as men. The same applies to thoroughly heterosexual men and women who are perceived as being weaklings. That means you can treat them like scum without batting an eye. Unless you can effectively change their collective minds so that they no longer see homosexuals (and women) as less-than-human sexual objects we’re always going to have this horrible problem. But then, that’s the nature of animal lust.

By: Michael Bauman

Michael Bauman — Sun, 17 May 2015 12:25:39 +0000

Chastity is much more than sexual purity. It encompasses all virtue and requires a focus on God.

Chastity is the guard against many passions including abuse of power, desire to control and willingness to hurt others: immoderate and destructive behavior of all types including gluttony and sloth and avarice.

Chastity is widly mocked and denigrated even more widely misunderstood.

Thus while there may be no direct causality linking sexual assault and lust or sexual depravity chastity is certainly part of the cure.

Chastity is not to be understood solely as an act of will–a suppression of desires. It is rather a recognition of and a reaching for something higher an active participation in goodness no matter the utility or the ease of the base.

There are a lot of counterfeit chastities in the world but they need not give real chastity a bad name. They just need to be recognized for what they are. One of the false chastities is the identification of it as solely sexual and coercive in itself as in the chastity belt which is a form of rape IMO.

By: James Bradshaw

James Bradshaw — Sun, 17 May 2015 11:24:33 +0000

“On the morning of September 20 [1999], two weeks before the warship was due in port, three men ambushed [Steve] Stovey in a remote storage area of the ship, where he’d been sent to get supplies. They threw a black hood over his head, strangled and sodomized him, then left him for dead on a stack of boxes. ”

DADT was lifted sometime in 2011. Prior to that, many sexual assaults simply went unreported (though many still do). A number of these assaults are against gay men by self-described heterosexual men.

I have a real problem with implying that these incidents of sexual assault are somehow intrinsic to the sexual orientation of the offender. A man who rapes a woman is not “expressing heterosexuality”. Very often, it doesn’t even involve lust. Men who rape other men in the military (or in prison) often do so while in a group and against a lone individual, and this assault sometimes involves penetrating them with foreign objects.

What this all has to do with a lack of chastity I have no idea.

I must confess to not having served, but it seems rational to me that putting an individual in an environment where authority, obedience and patriotism are the prime considerations and where taking the time to ponder the moral nuance of war is discouraged will reasonably result in young men and women whose relationships with others may be deformed in some sense (at least so long as they are in this environment). Racism is still a problem in the military. It would never even have been integrated had it not been for Truman’s Executive Order. Prostitution was so common in Korea that they set up brothels near US bases.

I don’t want to appear to malign the folks in uniform serving this country. I’m not a pacifist, and I understand the necessity of military force. I’m just saying that taking youths whose moral and mental faculties are still forming and putting them in this environment is going to result in some problematic behavior.

http://www.gq.com/long-form/male-military-rape

DANA CHIPMAN,
JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL
ARMY, 2009–13

“The way we socialize people probably has some effect on the incidents. We cut your hair, and we give you the same clothes, and we tell you that you have no more privacy, you have no more individual rights—we’re gonna take you down to your bare essence and then rebuild you in our image.”