Why do so many Americans oppose letting gays serve in the U.S. military? What were they against? What were they afraid of? And what were they hoping for or trying to accomplish? Beneath the instinctive hostility to gay soldiers, what was the real source of opposition to officially welcoming gay and lesbian Americans into the armed forces? The short answer is, in a word, morality. Millions of Americans found (and still find) homosexuality either viscerally repugnant or at least vaguely wrong. It logically follows that if something is bad, it should not be inflicted on an eminent American institution, particularly one that relies on discipline and a heightened sense of its own virtue as an antidote to the unavoidable fact that it’s ultimately about killing people.

While Powell was scrupulous about remaining high-minded, he never succeeded at explaining how the presence of gays would undermine order and discipline, and he never marshaled any actual evidence that gays hurt the often invoked notion of “unit cohesion.” In fact, he barely even tried, opting instead to simply assert the point as a given. Without proof that open gays harmed the military, Powell’s argument boiled down to this: Many straight people prefer not to be considered attractive to gay people.

Of course, military life was all about doing things you might prefer not to: wandering through a hostile war zone in the Iraqi desert in stratospheric temperatures; dismantling deadly IEDs blocking the path of your convoy; literally giving up a limb to defend your country. Service members don’t generally enjoy this stuff, even as they may embrace it as a part of their duty. Some might even regard these grim realities as quite a bit worse than showering with an admirer. By fixating on this particular hardship and suggesting that this alone would break morale, Powell gave his imprimatur not only to the preferences of straight soldiers not to serve with gays but to the notion that there was indeed, something wrong, something unacceptable, about homosexuality. Otherwise, serving with gays would have become just one of the hundreds of things men and women are required to do to become good, disciplined soldiers.