Military Punishment for Adultery, Harassment

“Prison--for love affairs!” writes Gregg Easterbrook (Opinion, June 15), expressing a just revulsion at the thought. Has the American military really come to this? Hopefully not. But if it has, it’s not exactly a new concept. Rather, for once, heterosexuals are finding, in at least one context, that the rules they hold homosexuals to every day are finally being enforced evenhandedly.

Heterosexuals have been all too comfortable asking homosexuals to live by rules that few heterosexuals would tolerate, and of which many, if not most, fall short. Witch hunts into the details of sexual behavior, hypocrisy, double standards and outright rejection of individuals who have demonstrated excellence are the everyday norm when we’re talking about homosexuality--and not just in the military. If the stories of Gen. Joseph Ralston and Kelly Flinn (and so many others) can help heterosexuals truly realize how the actual enforcement of these rules leads to bizarre and self-defeating ends, maybe their falls will not have been in vain.

DAVID LINK

Sacramento

At the pace we are going, we may find ourselves protected by recent recruits in the armed forces, deprived of all but a few officers, commissioned or noncommissioned. All the macho leaders will have resigned because of adultery.

Exploitation of a subordinate and actual sexual harassment should be prosecuted. A betrayed spouse should have the right to sue for adultery. But if every officer, from sergeant up, has to resign because he had an affair while married, not legally divorced or not even ever married, we will lose the majority of our best leadership. The absurdity becomes clearest if we think we should have been deprived of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s leading the Normandy invasion. We already have lost the first woman B-52 pilot and two generals. Let us stop shooting ourselves in the foot and reinstate the officers.

HILDA S. ROLLMAN-BRANCH

Pacific Palisades

Re The Times’ front-page stories on Ralston and “same-sex harassment,” June 10:

What a tangled web they’ve woven, those political and social activists, helped by men and women in government, who first having brushed aside fundamental human values and responsibilities, turn to micro-managing and judging the society they have created and haven’t a clue that they share much responsibility for the problem created. They are still engaged in trying to impose the old sexual revolution of the ‘60s on the nation, with all the consequences.

FRANK G. RIVERA

Los Angeles