Most Americans first heard news of this development on November 8, 2009, when General George Casey, reacting to the Fort Hood shooting, told a TV interviewer: “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” We were further enlightened shortly afterward on learning that Fort Hood, like most US military bases, is a gun-free zone.

(That would at least differentiate them from our railroad stations. In my frequent visits to New York City’s Penn Station”€”“lead us not into Penn Station…””€”I often see soldiers and soldierettes in combat fatigues wielding big, mean-looking guns patrolling the concourses. “Patrolling” doesn’t quite give the right idea: “waddling” would be closer”€”fitness standards in the military seem to have gone the way of courts-martial for buggery. My reaction on encountering these guardians of my commuting security is always and precisely the one voiced by the Duke of Wellington: “By God, they terrify me.”)

Turning military bases into gun-free zones is merely a rest stop along the road to making them testosterone-free zones. That in turn appears to be part of a scheme to fold the military into our culture of grievance, complaint, “rights,” and teeming swarms of lawyers stripping all the sense and virtue from the populace like locusts on wheat. A correspondent who knows the territory tells me: “Guys who served a single tour will get out and join the post office where veterans get very preferential treatment. Then they retire from the post office and head over to the VA claiming service-related handicaps.”

Soldierettes can claim a service-related handicap all their own: pregnancy. Following 1991’s USS Acadia scandal“€”ten percent of the female crew complement of 360 were pregnant on the ship’s return to home port”€”all branches of the service have worked hard to conceal and deny the problem, but it is large and inevitable. They are working hard to make the problem worse, most recently by putting women on submarines. Quem di volunt perdere dementant prius.

Homosexuals don’t have the pregnancy ticket to get them out of the combat zone and onto the benefits gravy train, but they have other options, as Petty Officer Third Class Joseph Rocha’s case illustrates. The whole sorry story is here; its bottom line (so to speak) is that any kind of allegation by a member of a Designated Victim Group will be believed by our thoroughly PC-compliant military brass regardless of its evidentiary weight. The DVG allegator…no, wait a minute…alleger will be extravagantly compensated and may even, like P. O. Rocha, get invited to the White House; the allegee will be eased out of the service under a cloud, even if he has heroic combat deeds on his record.

There are still a few corners of our armed services holding on to traditional martial virtues: honor, duty, sacrifice, small-group loyalty. Most of our military, though, might as well be hived off from the Defense Department and given to Health and Human Services”€”or perhaps to Eric Holder’s Justice Department, where the lawyers and “rights” activists could work their will on the troops without impediment. It is a good thing that we shall never have to fight a real, existential war!

We won’t, will we?