Moron

You know you're in bad shape when even most YW commenters think you're nuts:

“When Americans are suffering economically and millions need jobs, it’s shocking that the Administration is focused on its ultra-liberal militantly homosexualist agenda forcing the highlighting of homosexuals and homosexuality on an unwilling military. This is the equivalent of the spiritual rape of our military to satisfy the most extreme and selfish cadre of President Obama’s kooky coalition.

We agree with Eileen Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that this will hurt the cohesiveness of the military, cause many to leave the army, and dramatically lower the number of recruits, perhaps leading to the reinstatement of a compulsory draft.

“Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl.

“We plead with saner heads in Congress and the Pentagon to stop sodomization of our military and our society. Enough is enough.”

Whether gays should or shouldn't be in the military is a decision that military commanders have a better understanding of than anyone, and let them debate this with the White House and Congress. But this is just insanity.

Talk the Talk, March the March

Via LWY, I thought this was an interesting set of statistics - the demographics of enlisted soldiers in the US Military, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, and the US Military Academy. I think the most telling graphic is this one which lets you see the percentages in each state in terms of how many people they have in the military, the academy, or ROTC. The report focuses on dispelling the idea that the poor and minorities are overrepresented in the military:

Members of the all-volunteer military are sig­nificantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 per­cent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) pro­gram, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods—a number that has increased substantially over the past four years.

What is striking is that on the graphic which shows the state numbers of enlisted personnel the bottom rungs are filled almost entirely by liberal states (color is from the 2004 election):

50) North Dakota (48th ROTC, 41st Academy)
49) Utah*
48) Rhode Island
47) Massachussets (43rd ROTC, 44th Academy)
46) New Jersey (40th ROTC)
45) Connecticut
44) New York (47th ROTC)
43) Delaware
42) Minnesota (41st ROTC, 40th Academy)
41) Vermont
40) California (50th ROTC, 43rd Academy)

* Presumably, Utah has low numbers because the Mormon population tends not to join the military.

Of 19 blue states in the 2004 election, 9 are in the bottom 11. Of 31 red states, just two are. (Actually, after Mississippi at 39 come Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Maryland - making it 12 of the bottom 15.) Just a few interesting statistics...