Oh, the things that, to quote my friend Wendi Thomas, get wingnuts’ “delicates in a wad.”* I’m looking through my news sources and whatnot, and I have a found a DADT dead-ender writing a letter to the local paper, and man oh man, is she worried about the gays in the military! Look:
The military’s job is to be ready to defend this country whenever necessary, not to pander to people’s personal whims, especially one regarding sexual deviancy. This requires personnel to be in excellent psychological and physical shape.
And gays simply cannot do that! We do not have access to counseling or other mental health care, and we certainly never go to the gym to keep our bodies in fine form. Next:
It is a well-documented fact that homosexuals suffer from greater rates of depression, drug abuse and physical diseases than the general population.
It’s also a well-documented fact that where those statistics are greater, the root cause is discrimination from people like youuuuuuuuuu.
Can we expect them to perform at their best under the stressful environment of life in the military?
They can, and we know it, because gays have been fighting for the wingnut’s right to write whiny letters into the local paper for DECADES. She just didn’t know it.
The American Psychological Society did no favors to homosexuals when it removed homosexuality as a psychological disorder because now they can’t get the proper help and counseling they need to lead healthy, fulfilled lives.
Yes, it is terrible that we are no longer allowed to get counseling in order to lead healthy, fulfilled lives. Oh, wait, in the wingnut’s head-in-the-sand world, there is no such thing as a gay who is also living a healthy, fulfilled life. I understand.
We can expect to see promiscuity increase in the military, as homosexuals have many more partners than heterosexuals.
Yes, because straight soldiers are never slutty.
What about clergy and their religious freedom? Will they be forced to perform civil unions for homosexual soldiers? How can they counsel freely?
Wingnut definition of “freely”: Will they be free to unleash unnecessary, medieval hatred upon gay and lesbian servicemembers?
What about living quarters? Will the military and our tax dollars now have to pay for homosexual “bathhouses?”
Because all civilian homosexuals live in bathhouses.
If you think this can’t happen, then you are very naïve.
That’s why we are very thankful that Random Wingnut Lady wrote a letter to the paper. Otherwise, I don’t even think the worst, dumbest professional gay-hater has ever suggested that the military will have to fund bathhouses. Because, hi, it makes no sense.
There’s a reason that homosexuality has been anathema in human history for thousands of years. It is an unnatural manifestation of the human condition and is an aberration in society that requires help for those afflicted with it, not validation of their disorder.
Such big words for such a small mind!
The far-reaching ramifications of this decision are too numerous to list in a short letter.
Therefore she won’t! Time to go learn more about bathhouses and stuff, I guess.
“Delicates in a wad,” indeed.
*Great article, by the way, about straight people attending gay pride in Memphis. Read it!
Ding dong, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell really is dead. The Marines showed up with a booth at a Pride event in Pasadena, California:
With the official repeal last month of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, the Marine Corps, the service that was most opposed to ending the policy, appears to be leading the charge into new recruitment territory.
The end of the hush-hush era opens up another qualified pool of applicants, said Sgt. Monique Wallace, marketing and public affairs representative for the Marine Corps’ Recruiting Station Los Angeles.
Carlos Ramirez, a board member of San Gabriel Valley Pride, said he believed that his group’s Community Unity Day was the first Southern California pride event to host military recruitment. San Gabriel Valley Pride is a nonprofit group dedicated to raising awareness about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender culture. Other pride groups in the region, Ramirez said, had held events before Sept. 20, the formal end of the military’s 17-year policy that barred gay men and women from serving openly in the military.
Here is the part that will annoy Tony Perkins:
Tom Carpenter, a former Marine fighter pilot and a member of the board of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said he was impressed “Marines are leading the charge.” He said the move would improve the pool of candidates strained by two wars.
“They had tens of thousands of felony waivers, and they were taking people convicted of drug use,” Carpenter said. “This will increase the pool of people available and allow people who want to serve the country to join.”
Translation: with gays allowed to serve openly, the quality of recruits will go UP, which will make the military, even the Marine Corps, ultimately stronger. Sorry, bigots.
But it’s okay, you guys, because gay wingnuts aren’t like those whiny liberal gays who think the rights laid out in the Constitution apply to them! Silly liberals.
“Ann’s position on this clear, and so is GOProud’s,” says GOProud chairman Chris Barron. “We respectfully disagree. We aren’t the pod people here at GOProud. We can disagree among ourselves. Unlike the left and their RINO enablers we don’t believe that every person who opposes DADT repeal is anti-gay. Indeed Ann has done more for gay people — courageously speaking out at CPAC, for example — then most of the gay organizations here in D.C.”
The people who oppose gays in the military are not anti-gay, you guys! They just think that the military should be open to only some of the most qualified people in this country, not all. The fact that the ones they want to keep out are gay people doesn’t mean they’re anti-gay! Not in the slightest! Why, I bet some of those anti-DADT-repeal people would piss on gay people, if they were on fire!
But as I said weeks ago, Barron and Coulter look like they just might share a plastic surgeon, so we can understand why he would want to keep Waiting Room Time from getting awkward.
At Thursday night’s Fox News/?Google Republican debate, one question, posted to YouTube, came from a U.S. Army soldier serving in Iraq. Stephen Hill, donning a gray tee-?shirt emblazoned with the word “ARMY” on the front, asked Rick Santorum if he would try to “circumvent the progress” that has been made in allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly, effectively reinstating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The audience actually booed him. Hill, apparently, is gay, and was concerned for his future. The idea that anyone would actually “boo” a U.S. service member, serving his country, risking his life in Iraq, is beyond comprehension.
“Do you plan to circumvent the progress that has been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?” The crowd booed.
Morons. Santorum’s answer makes it even worse. He clearly has no respect for or understanding of our military, but that’s to be expected:
Answering Hill, Santorum said that “sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military,” and said the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which took effect this week, was injecting “social policy into the military.”
“What we’re doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now, and that’s tragic,” Santorum said.
Asked how he would answer soldiers like Hill, Santorum said he would not “throw them out.”
“But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past, which is, that sex is not an issue,” he said. “Leave it alone, keep it to yourself, whether you are a heterosexual or a homosexual.”
Oh god, he is so stupid. First of all, DADT has nothing to do with “sexual activity in the military.” Moreover, it’s not social experimentation when pretty much every single one of our first world allies allows openly gay soldiers to serve without incident. And on top of that, is he saying that he would put a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in place for straight soldiers?! I know that Santorum doesn’t consider or understand a damn word that comes out of his own mouth — that’s where his funny Google problem came from — but does he not realize that when a male soldier mentions his wife, he is implicitly stating that he is a heterosexual? With DADT gone, a male soldier is also free to mention his husband or put a picture of said husband on his desk, or in his quarters off in some war zone that we wouldn’t be in in the first place if pansy-ass Republicans like Rick Santorum didn’t support going to war willy-nilly in order to prop up their own fledgling manhood.
To their credit, the gay wingnut group GOProud actually decided to take the gay guy’s side in the argument for once, releasing this statement:
“Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology.
“That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done?–?put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-?gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.
“Stephen Hill is serving our country in Iraq, fighting a war Senator Santorum says he supports. How can Senator Santorum claim to support this war if he doesn’t support the brave men and women who are fighting it?”
Because he’s a moron who cares more about his bizarre, uncomfortable obsession with homosexuality than really anything else in this life.
Look, it’s Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council hate group, clinging childishly to the belief that average Americans are bigots with weird hair like he is. It’s very, very sad, and we should all take a break from making fun of him to pity him.
He says that DADT repeal will change the military, due to the fact that soldiers who are sad bigots like Peter Sprigg will have to take up a Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy about their weird, unnatural hatred of gays. Or something. Who knows what this man is ever talking about? Meanwhile, the actual military is pretty much shrugging their shoulders at the change, because they’re grown-ups.
Lt Gary Ross of the US Navy decided to get married the moment DADT’s repeat went into effect, just after 12:00 AM today; he did it in Vermont at gay-friendly Moose Meadow Lodge. How fitting: Vermont was the first state to offer LGBTQ people civil unions (as well as being the home of Truth Wins Out). Congrats, Lt. Ross and Mr. Dan Swezy!
We’re all relieved that DADT has passed into history. Yet we can’t forget that LGBTQ soldiers still lack basic civil rights their straight buddies enjoy. According to the great state of Vermont, Swezy is Ross’s legal husband, but he is nonetheless ineligible for military health insurance. Incredibly, anal and oral sex are still court-martial offenses under Article 125 of the military legal code. Transgender people may not serve at all.
Read Nathaniel Frank’s thoughtful piece on DADT’s damage, its legacy and what its tenure says about the national psyche.
In the lead-up to DADT repeal, the Religious Right went to great lengths to portray the members of the United States armed forces as an elite fighting force which happens to be populated by people are too sissy to deal with being around openly gay people. It was super weird.
But now that repeal is about to become official [tomorrow], it looks like the military is going to be just fine, thankyew:
For some gay service members, the fear of discovery and reprisals dissipated months ago when a federal court halted all investigations and discharge proceedings under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” while military leaders prepared the armed services for its end.
Several have come out to their peers and commanders.
A few have since placed photographs of their same-sex partners on their desks and attended military barbecues and softball games with their significant others. In San Diego, about 200 active-duty personnel — both gay and heterosexual — made up the nation’s first military contingency to participate in a Gay Pride march this summer, carrying banners identifying their branches of service. An Army soldier had tears, saying she was touched by the thousands cheering them on, after hiding her identity for so long.
[...]
Air Force Capt. Diane Cox, whose gay son served in the Navy, said she got into heated debates with service members vowing not to take showers and share rooms with gays before Congress voted to repeal the law, but after the military held sensitivity trainings to explain the new rules “everybody just shut up.”
Ha. The rest of the article sadly features more “not shutting up” from, you guessed it, chaplains. They are still very worried whether or not they, who are supposed to be able to minister to any and all troops in a time of war, will still be free to get a little gay-hatin’ in on the side. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: that these chaplains are so worried about people taking away their precious right to discriminate says more about them as human beings than it does about gay troops.
“Our troops’ religious liberties are in unprecedented jeopardy because the government has caved in to pressure from small groups of activists to impose homosexual and bisexual behavior on our military,” ADF Litigation Staff Counsel Daniel Blomberg said in a statement Friday.
The ADF statement came just after the Obama administration cleared the last hurdle in ending the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which barred openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. The ban will end after the 60-day waiting period, on September 20.
Once that happens, the first casualty may well be the religious freedom of chaplains and service members, Blomberg said. “No formal protections have been adopted despite many having been proposed,” he complained. “No Americans, and especially not our troops, should be forced to abandon their religious beliefs.”
Gawd, they’re melodramatic when they’re playing victim. Let’s break this down.
First of all, this has nothing do to with “our troops’ religious liberties.” One of the ways the Christian Right lies is by delusionally acting as if they represent the mainstream of America, or in this case, the mainstream of our troops. They do not. The majority of troops don’t care what the sexual orientation of the people they serve with is. They care whether or not they can do their jobs. It is a declining minority of troops who are so uncomfortable in their skin/religiously brainwashed that they are obsessed with other peoples’ sexuality.
Moreover, this has nothing to do with “religious liberties” in the first place. Are gay soldiers going to prevent these few wingnut soldiers from worshipping as they see fit? No? Well then, their religious liberty is intact! I am quite aware that the Christian Right views itself collectively as the World’s Best Snowflake Baby, due all the care, concern and deference their little hearts desire, but nowhere in the concept of “religious freedom” is the idea that they should be protected from people who think differently from them. Moreover, the bitching about the chaplains is always cute, as chaplains in a diverse environment such as the military are expected, as part of their job description, to be able to minister to all different kinds of people, including the many, many straight troops who have no interest in their bewildering, Philistine beliefs about human sexuality. And the idea that a wingnut outfit such as the Alliance Defense Fund is blubbering about chaplains being denied their “right” to preach hatred against gay people tells us more about their whiny, weird obsessions than it does about anything involving DADT repeal in the US military.
Finally, the quote about troops being forced to “abandon their religious beliefs” is simply insane to anyone with a triple digit IQ so I’m not spending a paragraph correcting it.
Hey ADF: stop whining. The Military isn’t whining. Try to follow their example.
Top defense officials plan to certify Friday that the Pentagon is ready to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military, officials said, a landmark moment after almost two decades of controversy.
The military now has to resolve crucial questions such as what benefits same-sex couples will receive.
While the military will be free to provide some services to same-sex spouses, such as family support for spouses of deployed service members, federal law blocks it from providing them the full range of health, housing and education available to heterosexual couples.
