The military does like to play around with vast sums of tax-payers money with little apparent gain to be sure. No matter how stupid, unethical or needless a scheme is, if it can have the word "weapon" attached to it then it's a winner with the warmongering classes.

The Berkley Sunshine Project, a watchdog organisation particularly into biological weapon investigation, recently used the Freedom of Information Act to get the great minds at the Pentagon to 'fess up to having a go at creating that most sensible, credible and mature of weapons....the Gay Bomb.

This chemi-hormone laden bomb does exactly what it says on the tin. Chuck it over onto your enemies and it would non-lethally burst open releasing a chemical that turns them all homosexual. Going by that well known (well, in the overtly homophobic military most likely, who especially in America tend to despise anyone remotely gay as being unable to possibly contribute towards any war effort) maxim that all gay people fancy all other gay people, it would not require much of an aphrodisiac to get the nasty foreign boys to drop their weapons and pick up their...ummm..."weapons" for an immediate battlefield orgy. This no doubt would provide a more than adequate distraction to allow the whole lot of them to be filled chock-full of depleted uranium shells or maybe shoved into Guantanamo. Really, these people would likely be both foreign and gay so on that basis alone a good 99.9% of the prejudiced boys-at-arms would probably think that that would be a job worth doing.

Ignoring the fact that to the Poorhouse's best knowledge, there has not actually been much of a suggestion that a chemical exists or is near to existing that turns people gay and makes them fall insatiably in love with each other instantly irrespective of massive danger to personal safety, the US Air Force laboratory apparently requested $7,500,000 to develop such a thing just over a decade ago.

The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay.

said Hammond, from the Sunshine Project.

You will be upset to here that this madcap scheme has apparently been turned down now (or so it is claimed), with the millions of dollars worth of research not yet complete. Not however before the Pentagon used the concept repeatedly to promote research into non-lethal weapons and had it reviewed by the "highest scientific body in the country".

As farcical as it is, the serious military interest into such a thing has caused a bit of upset amongst pro-equality organisations such as Equality California who said, fairly enough,

Throughout history we have had so many brave men and women who are gay and lesbian serving the military with distinction...it's just offensive that they think by turning people gay that the other military would be incapable of doing their job. And its absurd because there's so much medical data that shows that sexual orientation is immutable and cannot be changed.

What next? The Poorhouse wonders if maybe ploughing millions into research into a chemical that magically turns the enemy's guns into bouquets of flowers might be something of a better idea. After all, if any variant of this mythical chemical gayloveanium existed there would no doubt be a massive profit to be had in the civilian marketplace before throwing it away on ones' enemies.