Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in favor of dropping the armed forces’ 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and for the first time allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the U.S. military.
“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said it was his personal and professional belief that “allowing homosexuals to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”
When President Bill Clinton attempted to address this issue early in his first term, the ensuing controversy sidetracked his administration, and resulted in the insulting and unworkable half-measure we have today. But it increasingly looks like President Obama need expend little political capital to fulfill this particular campaign promise.
My what a difference a decade and a half makes.
What political capital? Obama can revoke DADT with a stroke of a pen. Clinton created it with an Executive Order. Obama can delete it any time.
Of course, if he feels he has the gay community in his pocket and doesn’t need to fulfill any promises to them, what are they going to do?
(Hint: The Tea Party crowd seems to be getting quite a large tent together.)
Men and women are serving together in combat zones, so I don’t see any issue with men and gay men serving together in combat zones.
Back in the ’60s, when America was in the throes of the civil rights movement, racial tensions existed everywhere in the U.S. Army — except in the front lines.
You almost have to have been there to understand this, but in combat, you don’t give a shit whether the soldier next to you is male or female, straight or gay, white or black, native-born or Martian. In that place, there’s only two sides, us and them.
@1 “(Hint: The Tea Party crowd seems to be getting quite a large tent together.)”
Yeah, if they keep growing like they have been, they might even become a minor third party.
If the tea partiers continue to be led by conservatives, they will live up to Hofstaedter’s vision of the paranoid style in American politics.
Personally, I think the Mason’s are behind it.
Interesting again that as conservative as Obama is in many ways, issues like this (and like health insurance reform) really have no part of the national discussion when Republicans are in power.
To speak a bit about tea-partiers, yet another group taken advantage of by Republicans for their own gain. Got a friend of mine in Carson City who’s a pretty hardened Libertarian (you know them, the ones who started this whole thing), who went to the first TP rally in Carson City only to see it had been pretty much taken away from those honest opinions about overtaxation and government control, and turned into (his exact words) “a freak show of right-wing hatred”. And after the TPX bus-tour came through trying to make a buck off the tea-partiers, my friend called bullshit on the whole thing. He won’t admit it to me himself, but his wife told me that they actually both switched their voter-registration from Independent to Democrat after that.
Oh, and speaking of Del’s “big tent”, $550 a pop to enter the tent is pretty steep, ya think?
Now getting back on topic, about bloody fucking time. I mean, come on! If the British can do this without causing a ripple among the troops, why can’t we? After all, you would think that an all-volunteer military would want to have all volunteers available?
And do you want to know the best way to break stereotypes amongst the troops? Training, and lots of it. Nothing special, no ‘sensitivity training’ or anything like that, just working together as a group for long periods of time. Stereotypes about people almost inevitably get broken that way. This is part of the reason why I’ve always felt that basic training should be extended to at least six months.
Allowings gays to serve and gays being accepted as peers are two different things.
Are there gays in the military? Yes
Have there always been? Yes
Unlike around here, gays in the military aren’t in your face about it.
In the end, no matter what the ruling, things will pretty much be the same in the military which is a lifestyle foreign to many here.
@7 If basic were six months nobody would enlist. You couldn’t draft them, either. They’d all be in Canada.
@8 “a lifestyle foreign to many here”
It is, and should be, a lifestyle foreign to everyone. Except a few professionals who make a career of it, and yes, we need those. But for the rest of us, military service is something we do once, for a short period in our lives, thank God, and then we readjust back to civilian life and values as quickly as we can.
The less of the military lifestyle this world sees, the better off you humans will be. The military is about blowing things up and killing people. Yes, sometimes you have to do that, but what kind of values are those?
Too damn bad you humans need militaries at all. That’s your fucking problem. We other species are tired of waiting for yours to clean up its act. This has been going on for a million years and we’ve seen no change. If it gets out of control, some other species (e.g. mine) will be happy to fill your niche after you’ve all blown each other to hell.
9:
You’re probably right, but would you agree with me on the point that working, living, training together would help break stereotypes?
That said, I still think that military service, while still remaining absolutely voluntary, should have longer terms of service. More training, physical and psychological, more emphasis on making a better soldier rather than expensive white elephants and what-might-be’s. And naturally more pay for those better soldiers. Gotta dangle an awfully big carrot (and you’d know carrots, right?) to get the best and brightest.
Just because the Commander in Chief, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chief of Staff (highest ranking military) says we should get rid of this stupid policy is NO reason to rush into this! Ahem! Of course, our ONLY major ally in the Iraq War, England, the only other country that contributed tens of thousands of troops, they have gays serving openly. Does anyone have any good news stories about our brave U.S. soldiers being raped by those mean old gay UK soldiers? Or gay UK soldiers not doing their jobs? Anything?
Of course not. This is brought to you by the same bigots that said we can’t have negros (said on purpose) in the Army…because…wait for it…it would UPSET THE BIGOTS WHO DON’T LIKE BLACK PEOPLE! Welcome to the world or circular logic. We’re not saying you can’t join, or have to be kicked out because of your performance. No. We’re saying if there are KKK soldiers who don’t like blacks serving in the military we don’t want to UPSET them and upset unit moral, so we best not let blacks in the military, or them fagots. Same reason. WHATEVER we do…don’t upset the racists…wouldn’t want that.
Listen you bigots pieces of s**t. If someone isn’t performing up to specs, or steals/cheats/rapes or commits a crime, kick them out. But otherwise is someone is willing to give their life in service of their country get over it.
Gays in the military have been there from ever since there was a military. It’s just time to acknowledge it and move on.
Heterosexuals will always want to be superior, that is the problem. I think their biggest fear is that some so called heterosexuals actually switch teams. And when all your life you starved yourself of all your feelings, you tend to not want others to have what you were denied.
Frontline fudgepackers, the movie!
Broadway Joe, you a fudgepacker?
Your wife and mom told me you were.
do gays make the military weaker or stronger?
do blacks make the military weaker or stronger?
do women make the military weaker or stronger?
do wiccans make the military weaker or stronger?
do short people make the military weaker or stronger?
do red haired people make the military weaker or stronger?
do evangelical Christians make the military weaker or stronger?
DADT is dead. Obama wants the Congress to address it so that the Executive Branch will have to enforce the new laws instead of having it hostage to the next idiot Republican who is elected.
Longer/more challenging basic training might help with another problem faced by not only our military but those of other countries, brought to light in the movie Soldiers of Conscience: that a surprisingly high percentage of soldiers discover, once in battle for the first time, that they can’t bring themselves to kill another human being.
I listened to Duncan Hunter being interviewed on the radio yesterday. He started out going through a carefully prepared statement–you could picture him puffing up his chest. He was certainly doing his best to sound very, very manly and authoritarian. When the interviewer challenged a couple of his statements (such as one claim that the military would be overrun by “hermaphrodites”) he quickly dissembled into stammering confusion. It sounded like trying to think on his feet while trying not to be overwhelmed by his own visceral feelings on the subject was too great a challenge.
At least he didn’t bring up necrophilia or bestiality.
Clearly Mark is a bigot, he probably not only has issues with gay people, but probably black people, Jewish People, Latin People, Asian People, Woman, and anyone else that isn’t White. Since he was the first to suggest that Frontline Fudgepackers would make a good movie, not that it wouldn’t, I’d question his own sexuality, deep down he probably has some undiscovered feelings for a big dick, why else would a so called Heterosexual be fantasizing and dreaming up what kind of movies to make.
Yeah, sounds a lot like Larry Craig Syndrome to me……..