Military academy hosts 'queer prom'
Has repeal of DADT opened doors ... or 'Pandora's box'?
by Drew Zahn
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
wnd.com
The birthplace of the American military’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, program is now the birthplace of first known “gay” pride events – such as a planned “condom Olympics” and “queer prom” – on a U.S. military campus.
Norwich University in Northfield, Vt., founded in 1819 as the first private military academy in the U.S., is in the middle of six days of events hosted by the university’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Question, and Allies Club, or NULGBTQA.
According to a university press release, six days of events are scheduled, one day for each color of the LGBT community’s rainbow flag, with each color representing a LGBT issue or theme, such as red for AIDS awareness and green for allies of “gay” students.
The events will culminate with the “queer prom” on Saturday, March 31, where Army Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Morgan and Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin will speak. Morgan publicly announced she was “gay” the day the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was repealed.
“The purpose of this event is to express and demonstrate equality throughout the Norwich community, along with the public, in order to promote membership in the NULGBTQA and to educate the public on challenges and issues faced by members of the LGBT community,” said Joshua Fontanez, NULGBTQA club president and a senior member of the Norwich University Corps of Cadets. “Departments across campus and myriad members of the Norwich Community are coming together in order to help create Pride Week, free for all.”
Some members of Norwich’s Christian Fellowship have been uncomfortable with a “gay” student club, the Associated Press reports, but Carlos Pinkham, the Christian group’s faculty adviser, explained the two clubs have found ways to work together, including attending one another’s meetings.
“We make it clear to them that we use the Bible as our guide and that as a result we can’t condone the stuff they do,” Pinkham told the AP. “But the Bible is also equally clear, in fact, even more clear [that] being judgmental about the sin without extending love to the sinner is another form of sin.”
In fact, the Christian Fellowship is co-sponsoring a film called “Lord, Save Us from Your Followers” as part of Friday’s “gay pride” festivities.
Norwich Vice President Michael Kelley, a 1974 graduate who spent 27 years in the military before returning to academia, told the AP embracing an LGBT club on a military campus is just a consequence of changing times.
“It’s saying that we as a military community are looking to more to the future, that we’re not quibbling about the past, what was or what wasn’t,” he said, “that we can take a leadership role to help move our students to a more enlightened future.”
But amid the hot-button issue of homosexuality in the military, not everyone agrees these “changing times” are leading to a “more enlightened future.”
“When the Obama administration rammed through the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ we knew these things were going to happen. We’re starting to see the fruits of that,” said Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality. “We saw the photos of homosexual Marines kissing in front of other families, and [the repeal of DADT] really is a Pandora’s box.”
LaBarbera told WND it’s difficult to uphold the military’s tradition of respectability and honor when that honor is loosed from its moral moorings.
“I saw a Naval Academy video where the sailor talked about right and wrong,” LaBarbera explained, “but once we start promoting and celebrating the immorality of bad behavior, it’s hard to hold up the military as a bastion of honor for young men and women.
“Not a lot of people think about it that way anymore,” he concluded, “but the university is taking pride in behavior the Judeo-Christian teachings have long held as immoral.”
Fontanez says roughly 30-35 students out of the university’s 2,300 undergraduate and 1,200 graduate students attend the NULGBTQA’s weekly meetings.
Club Vice President Robert Morris told Vermont’s Burlington Free Press that the club raised roughly $4,000-$4,500 to pay for the “gay pride” week.
Since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” roughly six months ago, other LGBT cadet groups have sprung up around the nation, the AP reports, including a group called Spectrum at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and a similar organization with the same name at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York.
On a related note, Knights Out, the USMA’s organization of West Point alumni, staff and faculty who support homosexual soldiers openly serving in the military, is hosting an inaugural dinner in cooperation with the campus Spectrum group on March 31, the same day as Norwich’s “queer |
