Sex In Uniform: Why the Increase in Sexual Assaults in the Military?

President Obama and the secularist liberals in the Congress are aghast because they expect virtue from people who they teach that no virtue exists. C.S. Lewis said in The Abolition of Man, "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

P>RICHMOND, VA (Catholic Online) - A new report was released by the Pentagon on Tuesday, May 7th that contained the disturbing, but not surprising, finding that the "official number" of sexual assaults in the military rose to nearly 3400 in 2012, while unofficial estimates based on polling of military members could add another 26,000 cases to that number.

The report said that 6.1% of women and 1.2% of men reported having been the victims of some sort of sexual assault. The numbers are up from a similar 2010 study which reported 4.4% of women and less than 0.9% of men had been assaulted. The calculated number of victims for 2012 would thus be 12,100 women and 13,900 men, due to the greater number of male service members. Considering male reluctance to admit being assaulted, particularly sexually, the figures for men are undoubtedly much higher than reported.

In a balefully ironic incident the previous Sunday, one Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski was charged with groping a woman in a northern Virginia parking lot. According to the Arlington County, Virginia, police report, 41-year-old Krusinski was drunk and grabbed a woman's breast and buttocks. The woman fought him off and called police, according to the report .The irony here is that Krusinski leads, or led, the Air Force's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit.

Pentagon press secretary George Little said in a statement that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel "expressed outrage and disgust over the troubling allegations and emphasized that this matter will be dealt with swiftly and decisively." Meanwhile, Congress is up in arms about Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan Helms' decision to overturn a jury conviction in a sexual assault case, and is holding up her nomination as vice commander of the U.S. Space Command.

In another similar case, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, commander of the 3rd Air Force at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, overturned the conviction of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, who had been found guilty of charges of abusive sexual contact, aggravated sexual assault and three instances of conduct unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman in an incident involving a civilian employee.

President Obama said he has "no tolerance" for sexual assaults in the ranks and pledged to crack down on commanders who ignore the problem. "I expect consequences," Obama told reporters at the White House. "If we find out that somebody's engaging in this stuff, they've got to be held accountable - prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged, period. It's not acceptable."

Strong words from a man who many consider to have made our Armed Forces a laboratory for social experimentation. He and a Democrat-controlled lame duck Congress in 2010 repealed the ban on gays in the military. On January 24, 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta removed the military's ban on women serving in combat. Implementation is ongoing, but women have been serving on ships for many years and what the Navy calls "operational pregnancies", becoming pregnant while deployed on sea duty, is common enough that an incident back in 1991 when thirty-six crew members of the USS Acadia were pregnant and had to be transferred during the supply ship's deployment to the Persian Gulf, led the press to dub the ship, "The Love Boat".

The bottom line is that due to Original Sin, we are all fallen. We all have a tendency toward sin that must constantly be held in check. Unfortunately, the twin doctrines of radical individualism and radical equality, that are the twin guiding lights of contemporary secularist liberalism and the bastard sons of Enlightenment thinking, militate against any form of self-restraint. Today the '60's admonition that, "If it feels good, do it" is the spirit of the age, and certainly the direction toward which the Administration is moving.

The great majority of service members are young people who are in their sexual prime. I used to think when I was on active duty that instead of offering comfortable co-ed barracks for sinful pursuits, the military should be acting in loco parentis for these kids and helping them to control themselves. We have the opposite trend under our current Commander In Chief, who evidently expects kids who raised hell in high school to become choir boys and girls overnight after they see a few training films during basic training.

Simultaneously and necessarily we have the de-Christianization that is going on in the services. The tolerance of homosexuality that the military now professes is accompanied by the usual leftist zero tolerance for dissent, and wielded like the hammer of Thor against the Church.

A few weeks ago, the Air Force distributed a document with the directive that leaders of all levels (including chaplains) may not "promote their personal religious beliefs to their subordinates or to extend preferential treatment for any religion" or face court-martial. Thus even counseling a service member that sex outside of (heterosexual) marriage is a sin could cost even a chaplain his job. If chaplains have to preach and teach according to the Obama rule book, they had better turn in their crosses and grab a hammer and sickle instead.

The bottom line is that there IS truth, and that truth is the same for everyone, no matter what you may personally believe. You may not believe in gravity, but when you step off a ledge you are going to be in for a big surprise. If some bright leftist tells you, "There is no thing as truth", ask him, "Is that true?" The truth is that people are fallen by their human nature, and they must be taught virtue, and not led to the near occasion of sin ("Deliver us from temptation").

In this case, President Obama and the secularist liberals in the Congress are aghast because they expect virtue from people who they teach that no virtue exists. C.S. Lewis said in The Abolition of Man, "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

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Dr. Frederick Liewehr is an endodontist who teaches and works in private practice. He converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1983, having been drawn ineluctably to Christ's Church by the light of Truth. He is a member of St. Benedict parish in Richmond, a Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus and a Cooperator of Opus Dei. 

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