WHY KELLY FLINN HAS TO GO
by PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
May 21, 1997Good for the U.S. Air Force -- for standing up to the banshees of political correctness and refusing Lt. Kelly Flinn the honorable discharge she did not deserve. Unquestionably, the court-martial and cashiering of Kelly Flinn is tragic. An Air Force Academy graduate and the first woman to fly B-52s, this 26-year-old superstar heard her private sins recounted in the public press and saw her remarkable career destroyed. It all seems so unfair.
But it is not, for Kelly Flinn did engage in misconduct "unbecoming an officer." Not only did she commit adultery with a civilian married to an Air Force enlistee. She lied under oath to an Air Force investigator. She defied a direct order to break off the affair. She took her lover into her apartment, refused to kick him out and invited him home to meet her parents. When Flinn and her lawyer demanded an honorable discharge, implying that, if it were not granted, they would go through with a court-martial at which the Air Force would be pilloried, they were playing hardball. This is legal blackmail and extortion. That the Air Force stood up to it is the best news to come out ofthis sorry soap opera.
Predictably, the case was seized upon by feminists, liberals and military-baiters to grind their rusty old axes. The Air Force is using a double standard, they raged, adopting a boys-will-be-boys attitude to Neanderthal behavior by male pilots, while brutalizing a woman for an affair of the heart. How dreadful! Twice, the court-martial of Kelly Flinn has been a subject of "60 Minutes," portrayed as a heroic Lt. Heater Prynne, forced by a hypocritical society to wear a scarlet "A" on her Air Force blue. The truth: Flinn herself has been demanding special treatment. No male pilot who was caught in adultery with the wife of an enlisted man, lied under oath, defied his commander and shacked up with the girl would be awarded an honorable discharge.
Any male officer who attempted Flinn's defense on "60 Minutes" ("I was 25 years old at the time and ... very confused") would be laughed out ofthe service by a press corps that has risen like Lancelot to the defense of Kelly Flinn. Can one imagine a Tailhook pilot offering the "I-was-only-25" defense? Or Lt. Calley offering such a defense for My Lai? Pleading youth and immaturity is fine for a high school girl caught up in a passionate romance. But we are talking about the Air Force pilot of a nuclear-capable B-52. Flinn cannot have it both ways. Either she is a bomber pilot who can be entrusted with a nuclear payload, or she is a vulnerable girl for whom we must cut some slack -- in which case she should go home to Mother.
Asserting that many revered military names have committed adultery, Flinn's champions have a point but not a defense. If I am arrested for speeding on the George Washington Parkway, it is no defense to say that everybody else gets away with it. That Flinn's sins are public, while those of other pilots remain private, testifies only to the fact that she is famous, and they are not. Having tasted the pleasure of fame, she is now paying the bill, as did Sen. Gary Hart when caught out, exposed and destroyed for a Capitol Hill tryst that is scarcely unprecedented in American politics. Like Jackie Robinson, Kelly Flinn had the eyes of the world on her.
She had to maintain Air Force standards, even if others did not. She flunked the test. She put her relationship with a married man ahead of her oath as an Air Force officer. Upon what ground does she then stand to complain, when the Air Force says: Very well, you have chosen this character over your duties as an Air Force officer; keep him, and get out of an Air Force whose rules you could not obey. Some in the media, who tend to be pro-choice on adultery, say it is puritanical and reactionary to make a big deal over adultery. But they are reflecting their own values. Whatever the modemists say, adultery is a breach of trust, a breach of faith, an act of deceit and treachery to one's spouse and a primary cause of family and social breakdown and human unhappiness from divorces to violent deaths.
From Othello to O.J. Simpson, everyone knows that. And while there is rank hypocrisy on the part of those who privately practice what they publicly condemn, hypocrisy is less destructive of society than brazenly claiming adultery is inconsequential, that all sexual morality is relative and that there are no objective moral norms. The relativists have a hidden agenda. As with homosexuality, they wish first to de-stigmatize adultery, then to trivialize it and then to offer its acceptance as an alternative lifestyle. Hollywood and the trendies are the Abraham Lincoln brigade of the Sexual Revolution. But they will lose, for even if they do not believe that a proscription against adultery came down from Mount Sinai, they know it is written on the human heart. And saying otherwise will never make it so.
Patrick J. Buchanan
Back to Chuck's "Must Read List"
Back to Home Page