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[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

I had a CBI Air Force Group Executive Officer named Carl Ablon---queer 
as a seven dollar bill and the best Executive Officer I ever ran 
across.  Everyone in our outfit respected him for his work  I didn't 
know who he played house with, and wouldn't have cared in any event as 
long as he performed top level work.


Homosexuality didn't adversely affect the greatest military leader that 
ever sprang from the Western World, Alexander The Great.  Didn't bother 
morale, fighting spirit or military accomplishment of his army either.  
Fine with me, if someone is seriously trying to kill me and my military 
buddies, I want our commander to be selected for military prowess, 
nothing else.  Homosexuality is a fact of life, affects about five 
percent of humans and domestic animals---I don't want five percent of 
volunteers or draftees escaping military risk faced by heterosexuals.  
No sense whatever to that.
.
And I want military linguists who understand local patois, not linguists 
who think they can communicate by shoutingl louder at the natives.



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*Press Room*
April 21, 2003
*Ousting Gays From Military Harms Security*
/*The Detroit News*/
by Deb Price
As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn torpedoed 
President Bill Clinton's proposal to allow gay men and lesbians to serve 
openly in the U.S. armed forces. The Georgia senator did it by taking a 
camera crew with him into a submarine to show sailors packed inside as 
tight as sardines.

By appealing to the then-widespread heterosexual queasiness about 
working in such close quarters with anyone known to be gay, Nunn got 
restrictions on how gay Americans can serve in uniform written into 
federal law for the first time in 1993. Until then, a presidential 
decree or a Pentagon directive could have lifted the gay ban.

In the Senate hearings that led up to passage of "Don't Ask, Don't 
Tell," military men with chests
*"SLDN is launching Operation Lift the Ban, a multi-year effort to 
persuade Congress to repeal the un-American law that has already cost 
taxpayers $258 million."*

covered in ribbons acknowledged that gay people have long served 
honorably. In fact, if the truth be told, gay men have probably served 
on submarines as long as there have been submarines and have certainly 
fought in wars as long as there have been wars.

But the brass adamantly insisted that allowing gay people to serve 
openly -- that is, allowing them to tell the truth -- would be 
disastrous. Military readiness, unit cohesion and morale would all 
suffer, the nation was told.

The gay ban, which lets gay people serve if they succeed in remaining 
closeted, was essentially a fantasy-protection act: It allowed those 
straight soldiers who'd rather not admit that everyone lives and works 
in a diverse world to pretend that all of their
Deb Price <http://www.sldn.org/templates/press/record.html?record=891>
Deb Price

comrades-in-arms are heterosexual.

Fast forward 10 years to today: Nunn has long since retired from 
Congress and Clinton is no longer president, but the dangerous gay ban 
endures.

Why do I call it dangerous? The requirement that the military boot out 
anyone it discovers to be gay is causing it to throw away precious human 
resources that our nation simply cannot afford to waste. If the ghastly 
terrorist attacks of 9-11 taught the United States anything, it was that 
Americans have got to better understand the rest of the world, including 
those countries and organizations that would do us harm. We have got, 
quite literally, to speak their languages.

Yet among the 906 men and women discharged last year simply because of 
their sexual orientation were seven linguists specializing in Arabic -- 
plus people with countless other vital specialties. The uproar that the 
dismissal of the gay linguists caused on editorial pages failed to get 
Congress' attention. So ousters continue. At last count, the 
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) had helped 24 linguists 
under investigation for being gay, including ones fluent in Farsi, 
Arabic and Korean -- the mother tongues of President Bush's "axis of 
evil," Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found 
that in 2001 the Army had a 68 percent shortage of Farsi translators and 
interpreters, a 50 percent shortage of Arabic experts and a 37 percent 
shortage of Korean experts. Unfortunately, those upsetting statistics 
don't translate into a great photo opportunity -- one powerful enough to 
jolt the sleepy Congress into lifting the ban that jeopardizes the 
safety of all Americans.

Most Americans do get the picture, though: 72 percent favor allowing 
openly gay Americans to serve, up from 53 percent a decade ago, 
according to the Gallup poll.

And now, SLDN is launching Operation Lift the Ban, a multi-year effort 
to persuade Congress to repeal the un-American law that has already cost 
taxpayers $258 million -- and that's just the price tag for replacing 
the 8,895 gay soldiers discharged so far. (For details about lobbying 
Capitol Hill on June 2-3, go to www.sldn.org.)

Today, openly gay soldiers are patrolling the streets of Iraq -- in 
British uniforms. It's time we follow the example of our closest ally.