Searching for the soap: coming clean on gays in the military.

As far as I can tell from news reports, the national debate about gays in the military has to do mainly with showers. If we can only solve the Great Shower Problem, we'll be able to let gays in.

The most obvious solution is to provide everyone with top-of-the-line bathing facilities, just like the generals have. I'll bet Colin Powell doesn't have to shower with the rest of the guys. I'll bet he never has to worry about one of the other Joint Chiefs snapping towels at him. Of course, if we let every sailor have a private shower and dressing room, we'll have to double the size of aircraft carriers.

Perhaps instead we could try a "custody of the eyes" solution. After all, if nuns were able to keep custody of the eyes for centuries whenever they went out in public, why can't soldiers do the same for a few minutes in the shower? The commander in chief could issue a strict order requiring all sailors and soldiers to look straight ahead on the horizontal plane while showering,just as they do on the parade ground. The trouble with this solution is that according to the latest research, 97 percent of bathers have the soap slip out of their hands at least once in the course of every shower. How will soldiers and sailors find their lost bar of soap while stating straight ahead? They could grope about with their feet, you say. But if another foot was touched, the question would arise as to whether this contact was sexually motivated. Was it an honest soap search? or was it homoerotic footsies?

Difficult as the problem is, I'm sure it will eventually be solved. If the Clinton administration has the brains needed to reduce the deficit and relieve the health-care crisis (and it had better have them), it will also be small enough to solve the Great Shower Problem.

And once we've solved the Great Shower Problem, everyone will be ready to welcome gays with open arms. (I speak metaphorically of course.) Right?

Wrong.

Because the controversy in fact has relatively little to do with showers. Even if we came up with the perfect solution to the shower problem--a solution that not only protected privacy but made soldiers both cleaner and meaner--most of those who oppose letting gays in the military would still be opposed.

In large measure, I believe, this opposition is based on concern with the state of marriage and family in America. Many opponents are convinced (a) that permitting gays into the military is one more step in the process of granting full moral legitimacy to homosexual conduct, and (b) that granting this legitimacy is yet another move---of which there have been many in the last quarter century--in the direction of reducing the legitimacy of marriage and the two-parent family.

Think of the key steps in this process of relative delegitimizing of marriage and family during the last twenty-five years:

1. No-fault divorce laws.

2. High divorce rates.

3. Widespread acceptance of premarital sex, even among adolescents.

4. Ditto unmarried cohabitation.

5. Acceptance of high rates of out-of-wedlock births.

6. Approval, sometimes verging on enthusiasm, for the single-parent family.

(Before someone bites my head off for this last point, let me say that 1 am as familiar as he or she with many examples of magnificent children raised in single-parent families. But the exception does not alter the rule; to believe it does is to commit what the logicians call "the fallacy of converse accident." It remains true that children on average are better off in two-parent than in single-parent families.)

Thus the opponents argue: to give moral legitimacy to homosexuality is to strike one more blow, and a very severe one at that, against the already battered legitimacy of marriage and the nuclear family. Therefore resist.

Someone will say all this is nonsense. "Granting increased legitimacy to homosexuality, cohabitation, single-parenthood, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, etc., does not subtract one bit from the legitimacy of marriage and the two-parent family. This is not a zero-sum game, where giving to one requires taking from another. Legitimizing alternatives to marriage and the two-parent family no more reduces their legitimacy than granting equality to blacks delegitimizes whites."

I hardly know what to say to someone who advances such an argument. I am baffled that anyone can be persuaded by such reasoning. But I realize there are people who are, vast numbers of people. My best suggestion is that they go home and reconsider what they are saying.

But let me try to answer anyway. Contrary to the objection, social norms are, in fact, involved in a zero-sum game. And marriage and family are normative institutions; hence they exist in a zero-sum environment. When we come to believe, for example, that robbing banks is an equally legitimate mode of getting money as honest hard work, can anyone deny that this belief undermines the legitimacy of honest hard work? As for blacks and whites: True, to say that blacks are equal to whites does not delegitimize whites; but it certainly delegitimizes the norm that says white is right; and delegitimizing that norm is precisely what was aimed at during the era of desegregation.

If this abstract answer isn't convincing, look around. Look at the world of marriage and family we have created in the last twenty-five years. Look at the out-of-wedlock birth rate: 25 percent of all births; more than 60 percent of black births; over 80 percent in some poor, black neighborhoods. Look at the "deadbeat dads," who father children and then take a hike, running away from the most fundamental of all human responsibilities, the duty of parents to care for their young. Look at the divorce rate: each year for about fifteen years now there has been one divorce for every two marriages. Then tell me this has nothing to do with reduced legitimacy of marriage and the two-parent family.

The most important long-term task facing any society is raising kids, getting them ready to take over the never-ending work of maintaining and improving the world. To date, the most effective mechanism the human race has invented for carrying out this child-rearing task is the married, two-parent, nuclear family. Yet for the past quarter century we Americans have been engaged in a relentless assault on this precious institution. We have behaved like Othello's base Indian, who threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe.

(Let's see...maybe each soldier could sit on a moving chair that would travel through an automatic car wash.)