A friend (thanks Tracy!) put me on to this connection…

This week the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, came out in support of repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that had maintained a bar on homosexuals serving in the US military.  He said:

My
personal belief is that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be
the right thing to do. I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that
we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about
who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, it comes
down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.

It comes down to integrity.  Certainly this is in keeping with American liberal cultural ideals, which would expect people to be true to themselves, not to lie about who they are and what they believe.  But it is also in keeping with another cultural tradition: Taoism.

I have discussed the notion of Integrity, de – 德
, in other posts, and I know that some friends out there do not like "integrity" as the prime translation of de, but I think it captures the Taoist resonances of the concept.  Here's what I have said in the past:

...I like the
translation "Integrity" because it gets at that notion of
particularity, that each thing is integral unto itself, and thus any
sense of "virtue" or "potency" or "efficacy" would follow from allowing
a thing to express its integral particularity in Dao (Way).

And those of you who know me, know my favorite Zhuangzi passage that gets at this notion, without ever using the character de:

     Sufficient because sufficient.  In sufficient because insufficient.  Traveling the Way makes it Tao. Naming things makes them real.  Why real?  Real because real.  Why nonreal?  Nonreal because nonreal.  So, the real is originally there in
things, and the sufficient is originally there in things.  There's
nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.
   
Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing
beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange – it
Tao they all move as one and the same.  In difference is the whole; in
wholeness is the broken.  Once they are neither whole nor broken, all
things move freely as one and the same again. (23)

可乎可，不可乎不可。道行之而成，物謂之而然。惡乎然？然於然。惡乎不然？不然於不然。物固有所然，物固有所可。無物不然，無物不可。故為是舉莛與楹，厲與西施，恢恑憰怪，道通為一

Each thing has its own reality and sufficiency unto itself.  In this manner each thing has its own unique character, its own integrity.  Denying a person the expression of his or her innate character, getting in the way of the unfolding of integrity in Way, is unnatural and doomed to failure.  Integrity, Zhuangzi seems to be saying, will out.

The link to gays in the military is thus fairly straightforward.  Homosexuality is an innate characteristic of certain individuals.  To force it to be repressed or distorted is an unnatural violation of the unfolding of Way.  We should not demand that people pretend to be something they are not.

Of course, someone out there might now bring up the point that the generally pacifistic Zhuangzi might be uncomfortable with the very idea of a standing military institution, which in itself might be a violation of the natural unfolding of Way.  But, at the very least, I think he would agree that denying gays the possibility of serving in the military is a distortion of Way and compounds whatever philosophical problems there might be with militaries.