By Maj. Gen. Tom Mescent
Special to YNOT

As someone in charge of the combat readiness and overall wellbeing of more than 12,000 American Marines, I cannot stress enough the importance of good morale — and good morals — among our enlisted men.

I can also tell you nothing undermines both morale and morals faster than looking at hardcore pornography, especially if it comes in the form of a magazine offered for sale at the Post Exchange (PX).

The bottom line is simple: If we want our noble servicemen to reliably kill the right people on command, we can’t have them running around the base with unsanctioned erections that violate the crucially important grooming standard. Just as unkempt mustaches serve to discourage unity and discipline in the ranks, porn-derived erections distract soldiers from the important tasks at hand.

If you look at the comments submitted to the Federal Registry in response to the reasonable rules and regulations regarding the ban of graphic sexually-explicit materials on military bases and the review board that is tasked with vetting porn accessible to servicemen at the PX, however, you’d think we’re depriving soldiers some sort of Constitutional right by refusing to supply them with disgusting gutter-smut.

“I believe this proposed rule is not only an excellent example of agency waste, but a direct infringement of Constitutional rights that employment by the [Department of Defense] in any manner cannot supersede,” wrote one deranged probable communist.

“It would appear there are some great ambiguities associated with the definitions that structure this rule,” the nearly-treasonous comment continues. “If an employee or citizen acting as a representative of the DOD has a foot fetish, will all magazines depicting bare feet be banned? Then the word lewd within the definition, what qualifies as lewd? Is it more or less lewd if in a novel the author describes an intimate evening between a hetero couple or homosexual couple?”

Damn right it’s “more lewd” to describe an intimate evening between a homosexual couple than a heterosexual one, but that’s not the point. The point is, we need to keep the minds of our soldiers innocent, pure and vigilant, so when they’re called upon to shoot terrorists, they respond immediately and effectively, rather than take a moment to fantasize about what those same terrorists look like naked before pulling the trigger.

I have seen firsthand the deleterious effect porn has on the willingness of Marines to kill, and to kill women, in particular. On a routine sweep near Ghazni, Afghanistan, just last year, one of our patrolling units held fire when they spotted a likely terrorist carrying what appeared to be several interconnected pipe bombs, because they “thought it might be Mia Khalifa.”

As it turned out, the suspected terrorist was an elderly woman using a walker, not a Taliban supporter with a small cage-like structure made of explosives, but we can’t count on getting this lucky every time. When in doubt, American soldiers must be ready to shoot first and issue apologies to grieving relatives later.

The only problem with our current porn policy is too many things tend to slip through the cracks — and I’m not talking about the accidental penetration of an anus by a poorly-aimed penis.

Back in 2006, for example, our porn review board ruled DVDs from a Jerry Springer video line called Too Hot for TV could be sold at the PX, despite their salacious, perverse contents. The impact was immediate and severely detrimental. Within days of the Springer DVDs going on sale, my Marines were angrily demanding each other to take paternity tests, flinging food at each other and trying to marry horses.

For some reason, our porn ban doesn’t even prohibit copies of Playboy, which was just about the only porn that existed when I was a kid. I suppose the women in it don’t actually put their fingers inside their vaginas on camera, but they still put them close to their vaginas from time to time, which suggests masturbation, which is not just a sin, but a distraction that undermines situational awareness, erodes combat readiness and abysmally fails to encourage an aversion to naked women.

Instead of questioning their value and mocking their purpose, we should thank the hardworking men and/or women who compose the DOD’s porn review board. Just like the brave men and women of our armed forces, the members of the board are fighting the good fight, sacrificing their own retinas and memory centers to keep our soldiers from being exposed to the corrupting influence of porn — except for those (presumably very few and far between) soldiers who know how to use the internet, of course.

Maj. Gen. Tom Mescent is a U.S. Marine Corps officer who approves of locker-room talk, sure, but not hardcore pornography, which is illegal, sinful and something he has been strictly forbidden from looking at by Mrs. Maj. Gen. Tom Mescent.