Americans are rightly shocked by the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. But my fear is that the young men and women who brought us Abu Ghraib are nothing less than the fruit of two generations' worth of a skillfully waged culture war by America's extreme left. What we are seeing is the "progress" brought about by the sexual integration of the military, the internet proliferation of pornography and homoerotica, and the kinder-gentler approach of military indoctrination used to train the new "Army of One." Military insiders can't say these things because to do so would be career suicide. Simply put, the social experiment of the sexual integration of the military has yielded the expected results: promiscuity and a breakdown of discipline. I graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1978. The date is significant because the first coed Academy class was graduated in 1980; therefore, I spent two years at Annapolis in a male-only environment and two years in a sexually integrated institution. We can draw a straight line from the feminization of our nation's military academies to Abu Ghraib. And let's not be naïve. This prisoner abuse scandal has just as much to do with human physiology as it does with sexual politics. Put young men and women in close quarters for a prolonged length of time and the inevitable happens. The sex drive of a 20-year-old human is far more powerful than the good intentions of the enlightened progressives who promoted the sexual integration of the military as a way to advance feminist doctrine. Some might say, what's the problem? Haven't we accepted as doctrine that one's sex life has nothing to do with one's job performance? Maybe in the White House but not in the military. It is extremely difficult to enforce discipline and maintain a chain of command in an environment in which most of the boys and girls are showing off for one another and many are trying to get in one another's pants. Yet, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal exposes more than the inherent shortcomings of the sexually-integrated military. Look at the "raw material" that our armed services get today: a generation exposed to virtually non-stop internet porn, the misogynistic message of much of rap, the affirmation that a Crucifix in a jar of urine is art, round-the-clock news stories that account the salacious details of horrible sex crimes, the glamorization and societal acceptance of homoerotica, and the desensitizing gratuitous violence of movies and video games. For the past forty years, the left pigeonholed anyone who decried the moral disintegration of America as fundamentalist, neo-puritanical, homophobic, anti-feminist bigots. Could we please look carefully at the pornographic images that our Military Police have so skillfully produced for us and realize that, through our leaders' unwillingness to say that some things are just plain wrong, and big media's eagerness to make money at all costs, that we are eating our young? It is no accident that twentysomething American soldiers are comfortable parading an unclothed prisoner around on a dog collar and leash, forming a human pyramid of naked men, and performing sex acts for an audience.
The Abu Ghraib "horror" has revealed once and for all an even greater horror: those who advocate the sexual integration of all aspects of society, the removal of all sexual taboos, and the feminization of traditionally masculine worlds like boot camp -- are winning. As a result we are all losing. It's no wonder that some of our service-persons would turn a combat-zone prison into a theater of sexual performance art. Maybe the disgust engendered in each of us by Abu Ghraib will help swing the pendulum in the other direction, before it's too late. After all, the next time we go to war, we might not have the luxury of fighting a relatively limited engagement against third-world insurgents armed with Soviet-era weaponry.