They believe, and it is a common enough view, that many homosexuals have grown up in a sexual culture in which libido is rampant and promiscuity unrestrained to such an extent that it might cause mayhem in the barracks. Whether recruits are homosexual is irrelevant unless and until it leads them to act contrary to military purpose.It will not do, however, to label the Joint Chiefs of Staff homophobic and leave it there. But the law does not forbid kleptomaniacs, alcoholics and homicidal maniacs from becoming soldiers. What it does do is proscribe all those behaviours that defeat the purpose of a standing professional army (and one, incidentally, having to adapt to a growing diversity of purposes). What they have wanted to say, presumably, is that gay people are subversive of military good order because they are disposed to behave in certain ways.

The Army, the Navy and the RAF are bureaucratic and hierarchical organisations. They depend sometimes - by no means always - on communal solidarity in the ranks and need to guard against a great variety of dispositions: towards stealing in barracks, drinking at moments of stress, killing except on command, and so forth. So much for the power of a prime minister over the military in a civilian democracy.Yet one of his problems is that the military men have been so mealy-mouthed. (She would have overturned the official ban on avowed homosexuals serving in the forces.) Tony Blair says he opposed the ban in principle but he couldn't support overturning it because it was opposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Radio listeners yesterday may have heard the leader of the Labour Party twisting on the contradictions of his own position on Edwina Currie's amendment to the Armed Forces Bill. You cannot at one and the same time oppose compulsory trade-union membership and say that gay people have no rights as individuals when confronted with prejudice and discrimination. What the Conservatives have never quite figured is that their own individualism is a protean force but one that makes constant demands on government and society to recognise individual rights. The "right" to be individual is often meaningless unless it has the sanction of the state and its courts.As the dominant principle ordering our society, it makes the specific instance of whether to employ gay people in the armed forces an open and shut case, doesn't it? Just as angry disappointment is the only reaction to cases of black soldiers victimised and rejected by the Army, so the exclusion from the ranks of open homosexuals looks like another example of our core principle being flouted. It was Luana's last Disney film for nine years. After teenager roles in such minor items as Joe Dakota, Rock, Pretty Baby (both 1957), The Wonderful Years (1958), The Young Captives and The Music Box Kid (both 1960), Patten found herself back at the studio where she started, making Home From the Hill, under the direction of Vicente Minnelli.MGM boosted its 1960 release with the excited words: "Home From the Hill is the answer to exhibitors' cry for New Faces, with the presentation of a trio of young people - George Peppard, George Hamilton and Luana Patten - in roles important enough to establish them as potential star power for the future!" Despite the ballyhoo, MGM did more for the two Georges than for Luana, who was given unexciting roles in Go Naked in the World (1960) and Thunder of Drums (1961), and then forgotten.There were other films; she made the Civil War tear-jerker The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1961) at Fox, and the glutinous Boy Scouts tribute Follow Me, Boys! (1966) back at Disney, but Luana Patten, who had married in 1960, was content to settle, at the age of 28, for a 20-year film career.Dick VosburghLuana Patten, actress: born Long Beach, California 6 July 1938; married John Smith 1960 (marriage dissolved 1964); died Long Beach, California 1 May 1996.. Disney intended Johnny Tremain (1957) for his TV show, but this story of the American Revolution cost so much to film, it was decided to release it theatrically in the United States.

Song of the South was her second film; her first had been MGM's Little Mr Jim (1946), a syrupy tale of children on an army post, but Metro didn't recognise Luana Patten's potential. Disney did, and followed up her Song of the South success with roles in Fun and Fancy Free and Melody Time (both 1948, both part-cartoon, part-live action revues). In So Dear to My Heart (1949), another period story with animation scenes, she was again cast as Driscoll's sympathetic playmate. Later she gives the dog to Johnny (10-year-old Bobby Driscoll, who was to die in 1968 after years of comeback attempts and drug abuse), a boy miserable over the break-up of his parents' marriage. Harve Foster, who directed the film's live-action sequences, declared little Luana "a natural".