I haven’t gotten too exercised about “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” I’m not gay, I’ve never been in the military, I don’t have big issues about gayness (how can I? I’m a musician.), and I’ve just not much cared. But LabRat made what I thought was a really sensible argument, which I passed on to an older friend of mine. And I got some interesting and response-worthy reaction:
Sounds like this dude is an obvious Fag and has never been in the Military.
Actually, she’s a married heterosexual female and a nuclear physicist. And she shoots. Nothing like leading with an ad hominem. In a firefight, most people save the .22 for when they’re out of ammo for the .308.
Soldiers lives depend on each other and there is no room for a possible sexual relationship between anytwo of them, because if push came to shove and human nature being what it is either of these lovers would sacrafice the mision and their comrades if doing so meant their lover would be safe.
OK, I’m not a big movie guy, but it seems to me that a staple plot line of war movies is the guy who threatens the mission to protect his buddy. In the movies, this usually works out because it’s the movies. I suspect that it works out in real life more often than you’d think, because everyone else (including the enemy) has the same impulse. Indeed, we’re always hearing about troops in Iraq watching out for each other. I’m not sure if that endangers the mission or not, partly because it’s hard to get a clear answer on what the mission is over there. If it helps soldiers survive, it’s ultimately mission-positive, since the mission is generally “Kill their guys, and don’t get your guys killed.”.
Now, the other problem with this argument is that it’s demeaning to heterosexuals, since it assumes that they are less loyal to their comrades than gays would be. Even if we factor in the insanity of emotional infatuation, I find it hard to believe that most men would allow a bunch of women to die to save their wives/girlfriends. One for one, two for one maybe? Sure. But masses of women? And losing your honor? Not a good trade. Figure also that bathhouse culture (a significant but not universal subculture of gayness) views sexual partners largely as fungible. So getting a BJ is going to make you massively stupid? Sure, sex does that; it’s made me massively stupid in the past. But not that massively stupid. If one is going to argue that erotic loyalties will make you fight harder for your beloved, then perhaps we should bring back the Sacred Band of Thebes.
It is laughable to think any GI would be worried about being raped or ogled or hit on by a gay man.
So it’s a non issue.
We were trained killers and would not tollerate such shit.
Oh, wait, you WOULD be worried but you’d “deal with it”? What you’re telling me here is that, rather than “making a man out of you”, the services are populated with people with no discipline and no impulse control, and that if a soldier were ogled by another soldier he would of course do what a “trained killer” would do. For a veteran, you don’t think much of our modern military, or of the military justice system. I’ve heard they aren’t really tough on female rape, but I suspect male rape would be good for some time in Leavenworth.
Well, regardless of the merits of the issue, it isn’t going to change, because it’s Obama. He’s got a committee working on it, so that he can tell the nutroots he’s doing something about it. But, just as in the musical 1776, “If [he's] the one to do it, they’ll run their quill pens through it.” Just as it took a Nixon to go to China, it will take a female evangelical conservative to open the military to gays.
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