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.
*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.
[Homestead] Silly season by rednecks.,
Tvoivozhd, 09/28/2004