In today’s Washington Times, Suzanne Fields writes what must be one of the stupidest Memorial Day columns to mar the pages of an American newspaper.

“War is hell,” she begins.

(Apparently no one has ever said that before.)

After describing a trip she made to see wounded veterans—in the future, all trips by newspaper columnists to see wounded veterans should be off the record, so that they can’t milk the experience of visiting those poor guys for a lousy newspaper column—Fields then goes on lambaste Ivy League colleges for denying ROTC the right to recruit on campus.

Those colleges don’t like the military’s discrimination against gays, she says. “But that’s simply a smokescreen; if gays were warmly embraced other reasons would be quickly found.”

Pardon my French, but that’s just bullshit. If the military lifted its ban on gays, sure, you might have a few 1960s-stragglers who’d continue to protest the military’s presence on campus. But the vast majority of students and professors would be happy to have ROTC back. Even if it’s only because of the awkwardness of appearing anti-military at a time when everyone wants to “support our troops.”

(Which we should do, of course…by doing things like providing them with the armored Hummers they need, paying them decently, and not letting them be ripped off by sleazy insurers preying on their fears before they go to Iraq.)

Discrimination against gays is something these universities take seriously, even if Fields doesn’t.

But here’s my favorite part of Fields’ column:

“Patriotism remains a tough sell on some of our most ‘prestigious’ campuses. Yale and Brown, along with Harvard and Columbia, have no ROTC program. Perhaps it’s tradition. Though New England took pride in its abolitionist sentiment, far fewer Harvard students rushed to enlist than their Confederate counterparts on Southern campuses when war broke out between the state….”

I certainly agree that Harvard students should do their part in wartime, and that it’s important for Harvard that it feels the trauma of war just like any other part of America.

But to say that Southern slaveholders who rushed to war to fight for slavery were greater “patriots” than Harvard students were…. Well, that suggests that Fields’ understanding of history is as silly as her interpretation of current events. After all, given that Harvard volunteers were fighting for the Union and Southern men were fighting to secede from it, then by definition, every Harvard soldier was a patriot, and every rebel was…not.