The U.S. Navy: Rum, buggery, and the lash
Going forward, here’s a good way to think about the U.S. Navy.
I might have been one of the few people in America who was not shocked to learn that the U.S. Navy used a drag queen to fill its recruitment gap:
View this post on Instagram
Why wasn’t I shocked? Because I started writing about “Harpy Daniels” back in 2018. It was already apparent then which way the Navy was going.
The Navy has always had a reputation. A former Army friend of mine loves to drop politically incorrect jokes about homosexuality whenever he learns someone is or was in the Navy or the Marines. (Although he’s polite doesn’t joke if the person can hear him.)
Most famously, of course, Winston Churchill offered his opinion about the British Navy:
CHURCHILL’S description of the Royal Navy is included in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as having appeared in the book, Former Navy Person, by Sir Peter Gretton. The Oxford Dictionary suggests that Churchill’s phrase should be compared with naval phrases dating from the 19th century – ‘Rum, bum and bacca’ and ‘Ashore, it’s wine, women and song, aboard it’s rum, bum and concertina’.
It looks as though here, as elsewhere, Churchill took an earlier quotation and improved upon it. In The Irrepressible Churchill, compiled by Kay Halle (Robson Books, 1985), Churchill is said to have used the phrase in 1913, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. According to ‘an ear-witness’, he was having trouble with some of his admirals at a strategy meeting. One of them accused him of having impugned the traditions of the Royal Navy, provoking the reply: ‘And what are they? They are rum, sodomy and the lash’.
You’ve probably heard the quote as “Rum, buggery, and the lash,” which means the same.
Last night, I was at a Moms for Liberty gathering talking with a friend about the Harpy Daniels scandal, and I quoted Churchill. It turned out she hadn’t heard that line before, and was unfamiliar with the term “buggery.”
After defining it for her, I said, “Think of it as a gay S&M orgy in San Francisco. That’s what our Navy has officially become.”
I thought my line was kind of funny, but there’s actually nothing funny about the situation. The left has always hated the U.S. military because it defends America and, to the left, America is indefensible. The emphasis on homosexuality and transgenderism in the military isn’t intended to make it more inclusive; it’s intended to take a powerful male fighting force and destroy it from within. And Harpy Daniel’s is this month’s weapon of choice.
Image (edited) by istolethetv. CC BY 2.0 license.
