By Bryan Fischer

A desperate, last-minute attempt by Harry Reid, Nevada’s next ex-senator, to ram the moral values of the left down the throat of our entire military failed yesterday. This was a momentous failure for the left on one of the most important votes in our nation’s history.

For people who claim you can’t legislate morality, Reid and his colleagues seemed awfully eager to impose their code of sexual conduct on the armed services whether they wanted it or not.

This vote was historic, a vastly more important vote than most people realize or can even imagine. If the law banning homosexuals in the military had been overturned, the character of the military would have been changed forever and our national security permanently and disastrously weakened.

Hooray for the Marines, by the way. President Obama’s choice to be the next Marine Corps Commandant spoke truth to power yesterday in the Senate Armed Services Committee. He told the committee that most Marines - you know, the folks that actually would have to live with this harebrained and dangerous change in policy - are opposed to the normalization of deviant sex in the military.

Said Marine Gen. James Amos, “I’ve heard at the Marine bases and the Marine input for the online survey has been predominantly negative.”

Hmmm. Marines don’t want to be ogled sexually in the shower, don’t want males climbing into their bunks in the middle of the night, and don’t want to be irritated by fending off sexual advances from other males. Who’d a thunk?

Instead, they just want to focus on the military’s main task: killing people and breaking things so the rest of us can sleep safely in our beds at night. Good on ya, Gen. Amos, for taking on your own Commander in Chief and telling the public an inconvenient truth.

Homosexual conduct is deviant sexual conduct. Homosexuals are defined by one characteristic and one characteristic only: they want to use the anal cavity for sex. This kind of sexual conduct is aberrant and carries enormous health risks. It’s so dangerous that the FDA will not allow a male to donate blood if he has engaged in homosexual conduct even one single time since 1977.

To normalize sexual perversion is a mistake in any segment of society, but particularly harmful when done in the military because it will drive values-driven men and women right out of the service, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Had this vote gone through, it would have meant the end of military careers for every service member, every officer and every chaplain who believes that homosexual behavior is fundamentally unnatural and should be discouraged rather than endorsed.

Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick made this abundantly clear, in remarks quoted by the Washington Times last Friday. His comments are particularly relevant since he is the deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel matters for the U.S. Army.

Said Bostick (emphasis added), “Unfortunately, we have a minority of service members who are still racists and bigoted, and you will never be able to get rid of all of them. But these people opposing this new policy will need to get with the program, and if they can’t, they need to get out.”

What Bostick was saying is that it would be a career-ending offense to believe in natural sexual morality. If you don’t embrace sexual deviancy, says this general, you are finished in the military.

The impact on readiness, retention, and recruitment would have been utterly catastrophic. Character-driven officers, gone. Character-driven service members, gone. Character-driven chaplains, gone. Character-driven recruits, gone.

We would be left with a military comprised of nothing but sexual deviants and those who celebrate sexual deviancy. That is a guaranteed path to a permanently and irreversibly emasculated military that could not defend us if their lives - let alone ours - depended on it.

Another implication of Bostick’s statement is chilling. His statement makes it clear that if the homosexual lobby accomplishes its goals, it will be the end of religious liberty in America. Every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of religious freedom. We as a nation must choose between the homosexual agenda and liberty, because we can’t have both. Yesterday the Senate chose well.

I have often been unhappy with Sen. John McCain, but on this issue, an entire nation owes him an undying debt of gratitude. He was the Rock of Gibraltar on this one, and was the one man standing between us and the pitchforks.

This was a narrow victory for America and American values. We were four votes shy of losing our country forever yesterday. We must remain vigilant, and we must work to send leaders to Washington on November 2 who will make legitimizing homosexuality in the military an unthinkable thing.

This issue also illustrates why those like Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour and Paul Ryan are so mind-numbingly wrong to tell us we must abandon social issues at the present moment. Yesterday, the abandonment of social conservatism nearly destroyed our military and our nation along with it.

For what good is a healthy economy if you don’t have a military which can protect it?

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)