Half a dozen years ago it would have been unthinkable, but on November 2, two men who graduated from West Point were “married” to each other at the U.S. Military Academy’s Cadet Chapel (shown) — the same sacred place of Christian worship that has held the funerals and memorial services of fallen soldiers and august military commanders.
The Associated Press reported that Larry Choate III, a 2009 West Point graduate, and Daniel Lennox, a 2007 graduate, married in a ceremony attended by some 20 family and friends. “Choate, 27, taught Sunday school at the U.S. Military Academy’s Cadet Chapel and said he always thought of it as the place he would get married if he could,” reported the AP.
“It’s maybe one more barrier that’s pushed over a little bit, or maybe one more glass ceiling that’s shattered that makes it easier for the next couple,” Choate quipped before the controversial ceremony. Neither of the men is currently active in military service.
In 2012, West Point officials allowed the academy’s first two same-sex ceremonies, when, within a two-week period, two women who had graduated from the academy married their lesbian partners, one at the Cadet Chapel and the other at the Old Cadet Chapel, which is located in West Point’s cemetery.
Ironically, the Cadet Prayer, which graces the Cadet Chapel, reads in part: “Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy. Guard us against flippancy and irreverence in the sacred things of life.”
In October 2011, barely two weeks after the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which officially enforced the military’s 200-plus-year ban on homosexuals in military service, the Pentagon issued a policy update allowing military chaplains to officiate at same-sex wedding ceremonies. “A military chaplain may participate in or officiate any private ceremony, whether on or off a military installation, provided that the ceremony is not prohibited by applicable state and local law,” a memo on the Defense Department’s website explained. The memo added, however that “a chaplain is not required to participate in or officiate a private ceremony if doing so would be in variance with the tenets of his or her religion.”
In related news of the untoward, the U.S. Supreme Court building was the site of two homosexual pairing ceremonies in late October, when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor both performed same-sex weddings in the High Court building.
According to an announcement in the New York Times, Ginsburg presided over an October 26 pairing ceremony in her own chambers between one of her former law students, Ralph Lee Pellecchio, 64, and James Carter Wernz, a 69-year-old New York physician.
On October 29 O’Connor presided over the second official Supreme Court homosexual marriage ceremony, which a High Court spokesperson said took place in the building’s lawyers’ lounge. One of the two men involved was Jeffrey Trammell, a former rector at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, where O’Connor served as chancellor.
In August, shortly after the Supreme Court struck down a key portion of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, opening the way for full legalization of homosexual partnerships as equal to marriage, Ginsburg officiated at her first official homosexual pairing ceremony, between Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and Kaiser’s homosexual partner, identified as government economist John Roberts. The event took place at the Kennedy Center, where Ginsburg, an opera fan, has been a frequent guest.
In candid comments that clearly showed a strong bias in favor of same-sex “marriage,” Ginsburg told the Washington Post before the August ceremony that it would represent “one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship.”
LifeSiteNews.com recalled that in 1986 Justice O’Connor joined the Supreme Court majority to uphold a Georgia ban on homosexual behavior, siding with the opinion of Justice Byron White, who wrote that a constitutionally protected right to engage in homosexual behavior was “at best, facetious.”
But by 1996 O’Connor had conveniently switched sides in the debate, “joining Justice Anthony Kennedy and four liberal justices in ruling that Colorado could not constitutionally bar municipalities from passing homosexual anti-discrimination laws, giving homosexuals their first major Supreme Court victory,” reported LifeSite. “Then, in 2003, during Lawrence v. Texas, she sided with Kennedy again, ruling that Texas’ anti-sodomy law was unconstitutional.”
The ruling in that case invalidated bans on homosexual behavior in over a dozen states, effectively legalizing the once-criminal sexual practice nationwide.
