You just can't keep me down or out of the "Sun."
The editor has encouraged me to report in monthly from afar, and I'm taking him
up on it. --S/f, EFP
Expanded pursuit of happiness
Ed Palm, your former community columnist turned
far-flung correspondent here, staying in touch just as I said I would in my
"Farewell to rhetorical arms" column (June 5).
Something happened to me recently that, in the
words of the poet, "has given me a change of heart ... and saved some part
of a day I had rued."
As you may have heard, summers are hot and
humid here in Virginia. Today found me not just overheated but generally
frazzled over dealing with all the details of moving so much so that I reverted
to absent-minded-professor type.
I had just come out of Lowes with a new weed
eater and an $11 roll of laminate shelf paper. Needing both hands to load the
weed eater into my truck, I set the shelf paper on the roof. (Dont get ahead of
me now.) Sure enough, I drove off with the! shelf paper on the roof, and Mrs.
Palm was sorely disappointed when I came home without it. So back to Lowes to
see if it was still there in the parking lot. It wasnt.
I went in to the customer- service desk and
confessed to carelessness, asking if anyone had found and turned in a roll of
shelf paper. Sure enough, someone had a roll rendered unusable due to
tire-tread marks running across it.
Would you believe that they gave me a new roll
free of charge?
Mrs. Palm, who was born in North Carolina,
wasnt surprised. (Ours is a mixed marriage. I self-identify as a Yankee.)
"This is the South. People are nice here," she explained.
Of course, there are nice people all over in
Western Washington as well as Virginia. We just need more of them everywhe! re.
But enough about my trials and tribulations. On
to the passing scene.
The big news out of the Pentagon lately has
been the decision to allow transgender troops to serve openly in the military.
Im sure well be hearing the same objections to this development that we heard
about allowing gays to serve openly that it will undermine unit cohesion and
threaten good order and discipline. I remember hearing the military enthusiast
and popular novelist Tom Clancy sneering to the effect that the real men in the
101st Airborne wouldnt stand for having gays in their midst. But stand for it
they did, and I predict that todays young troops will roll with this reform as
well.
As forme, despite being an old fogey, Im fine
with allowing a transgendered person to enlist or be commissioned under the
gender to which he or she has transitioned. But that should be it. My concern
is that the Departm! ent of Defense will also shoulder the expense of surgery
and treatment for those still in transition as well as for those who have yet
to begin the process. Undoubtedly, some few will enlist just to change gender
at taxpayer expense.
The irony is that the Pentagon is undertaking
this reform at the same time it is whittling away at retiree medical benefits
and otherwise looking to cut the exorbitant personnel costs of the
all-volunteer force.
As Ive argued before, the key to having a
costeffective military is simply to stop enlisting people with multiple
dependents and to start restricting family benefits to career NCOs and
officers. We have economic refugees enough in the ranks. We need more troops
motivated to serve in the old selfless sense of the term be they gay, straight,
or transgendered.
Another blip stillon my radar screen is the
legalization of same-sex marriage.
Constitutional issues and societal objections
aside, what I keep coming back to is our Declaration of Independence. Ever
since Lincoln invoked that document in justifying the Civil War, affirming that
"all men are created equal," another of Jeffersons presuppositions
has done as much, if not more, to shape American attitudes and expectations. Im
referring to the claim that "the pursuit of happiness" is an
"unalienable" right. If marrying makes a same-sex couple happy, who
is it hurting? Gaysand lesbians are merely claiming the same rights and legal
protections afforded by heterosexual marriage.
The religious right, of course, will never be
reconciled to same-sex marriage. "Chief Justice Roberts, tear down this
wall of separation between church and state!" would seem to be what some
are saying. That would be an outcome far worse th! an allowing gays and
lesbians to marry. Like it or not, the Bibles strictures defining marriage and
condemning homosexuality are not normative for everyone in our secular, pluralistic
society.
For my part, Im content to thank God for the
blessing of air conditioning. Its so hot and humid here that adhesive Mylar
numbers wont stick to our new mailbox.
Give thanks back there in Western Washington
for your temperate climate.
Contact the sweltering Ed Palm at
majorpalm@gmail. com.
ED PALM
COMMUNITY COLUMNIST 
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