To their everlasting disgrace

Males were responsible for the public face of public honor while females were responsible for the public face of private honor. 

Public honor is that which transpires between a fellowship in defense of their honor code; private honor is that which transpires between males and females in defense of their honor code. Homosexuality inverts those relations. It confounds the public honor with private honor in the same way as homosexuality in the military, by complicating the connection between fellows with the connection between lovers, confounds public honor with private honor. So too with the role of women in the military, although the question of women in the military is more nuanced because it recognizes the new realities of modern warfare where personal heroism and individual strength no longer work to manifest courage and the defense of honor. 

The Republican Party is defending the old values of honor and the distinction between the manly versus the feminine, the public versus the private precincts of honor. The Democratic Party is trying to change the calculus. It is the Democratic Party's responsibility to make a clear case for the new rules of engagement. Unfortunately the leadership of this Democratic Party is simply not up to the task, and in their failure they are discrediting the advance of the progressive values for which so many in the 20th century dedicated their life's purpose to develop. Just as the Cheney administration, with the botching of the War in Iraq, is discrediting a noble ideal of bringing freedom and liberty to the sprawling cultural morass of the Arab Middle East, so the contemporary Democratic Party is discrediting the progressive values of the 20th century which were trying to shape a world where honor has its proper place alongside and slightly behind virtue, dignity and reverence – the qualities of authenticity. 

That value was the clarion call of the sixties generation. When, in The Catcher In the Rye, Holden spoke about phoniness, he was capturing the central issue of the fifties. The dismantling of Victorian codes of sexual conduct went hand in hand with the dismantling of the even older codes of honor that propelled young men into a stupid Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was being waged for as dubious a reason as was WWI, and the new, boomer generation would not go softly into the slaughter the way, to their everlasting disgrace, their grandfathers had done.