As many of you know I served in the U.S.Navy, though I was a poor sailor and for me military life as particularly bad fit. The recent SCOTUS action that removed a number of injunctions concerning Trump’s transgender ban sparked a few thoughts on military service, exclusions placed on military service, and what that could mean.

People who step up and volunteer to serve in armed forces and associated branches of service deserve, in general, deep respect and admiration. Service is dangerous, even in peacetime, accidents with powerful machines and lethal weapons happen and they take lives. On my one Western Pacific (WestPac) cruise I remember two deaths and two instances of gross injury, though that cruise had an unusual amount of bad luck during its duration. The people who serve are putting their life and health on the line for the benefit of our collective society. (Clearly this applies as well to other dangerous public services jobs such as police and firefighting, but my essay is going to remain fixed on military service.)

Who is allowed serve or is forced to serve can illuminate aspects of the culture and its ideology. Universal forced conscription, particularly if it is open ended and not as a brief period used to help generate a large reserve, often indicates that the state views the individual as merely a function for the state and not as a realized human being. Your duty and your value are derived from what you can generate for the state and has no intrinsic value beyond that.

Excluding groups usually falls into one of two categories; either the group is placed on a ‘too valuable’ pedestal, which historically has been the argument for denying women the right to serve, or they are not considered a good standing member of society, that is to say they are not ‘one of us.’

The prior category often in society’s eyes infantilizes its subject, judging them as unfit to make their own life decisions and removing from them the liberty to live as they wish. The second category places people outside of ‘civil society’, judging them as outcasts and unworthy of the respect that inherently comes of volunteer service. Note that in 1934 the Nazis banned Jews from serving in their military, an action that possessed no rationale other then bigotry.

Even as far back as 1979 when I enlisted in the Navy it was clear to me that the ban on homosexuals serves in the US Military was from any rational viewpoint deeply flawed. It was ‘explained’ to us that homosexuals presented a security risk as they made easy targets for blackmail, but the fulcrum of that blackmail was their exclusion from service, creating a vicious circle.

Banning transgender persons, homosexuals, and others along such lines is a statement that those people are not ‘one of us’, that they are not worthy of respect, and that their existence should be minimized in our society. That is a viewpoint I cannot endorse, I cannot stay silent upon, and one I will also criticize to my best ability.