I was thinking does everyone in the GLBT community want DADT repealed.

[ProgressOnTheMove]

I mean doesn't repealing DADT assume that the military is forward thinking enough to accept openly gay people in the military. I'm just thinking back to the Hassan case due his difference he was tormented enough for him to flip out, not that his actions were anyway excusable but it happened. So, I'm all for advancement, but being realistic is the military ready for repealing DADT?

[lazarus]

1. has been for years

I knew more gays in the military than at any other time in my life. My first gay experience was in the military. This was back in the '80s. Everyone knew who the gays were, but except for the periodic witch hunt by a zealous commander, nobody said anything about it.

My wife's a retired Navy chief, and she says the same thing applied in the Navy. In both branches (I was Air Force) the best seamen/airmen were the gay ones.

The only people with trouble are bigots, and there aren't many of them left (except the new Air Force, which is being overrun by Fundies).

BTW, repealing DADT isn't the last step. The military would still have to take homosexuality out of the UCMJ. DADT is just a way of treating the regulation.

[ProgressOnTheMove]

4. Sure that makes sense, just useful to know how things operate on the inside.

[Jamastiene]

5. +1

Thank you for your perspective.

[Luminous Animal]

2. So you're worried about fags running amok?

[ProgressOnTheMove]

6. Oh no, not what I was saying I was more looking how someone can be harrassed for being different but

thanks for demonizing me I feel real good now. Not what I was suggesting at all just the harrassment, if he can get such harrassment for being different. it's plausible others can too.

[LostInAnomie]

3. Apples and oranges.

Hasan is a deeply disturbed man and a religious zealot. His troubles with other soldiers was largely a product of his own behavior.

The grand majority of homosexuals are not mentally unstable and have the coping abilities and legal mechanisms to handle any torment they my receive from homophobic soldiers. They would be no more likely to go on a shooting rampage than their heterosexual co-workers.

[ProgressOnTheMove]

7. But there are reports of very far right wing christians in the military. I'm just wondering...

if this is some of the Presidents reservation of overturning DADT. That's what I was thinking, but definitely not that someone would do a jihad that wouldn't logically follow in this scenario.

[Smarmie Doofus]

8. I do. Everyone I know does.

>>>>>I mean doesn't repealing DADT assume that the military is forward thinking enough to accept openly gay people in the military.>>>>>
No, not at all.

>>>>> I'm just thinking back to the Hassan case due his difference he was tormented enough for him to flip out, not that his actions were anyway excusable but it happened.>>>>

Ya lost me here. Out GLBT's are gonna go bezerk and start killing people but closeted GLBT's won't? That's quite a leap.


>>>> So, I'm all for advancement, but being realistic is the military ready for repealing DADT?>>>>>

Nobody is ready for anything where social change is concerned. It happens anyway and people get used to it.

[KharmaTrain]

9. Not During A "Time Of War"...

Let me state without question that I feel not only DADT should be repealed immediately but any discriminatory laws aimed at GLBT Americans.

That said, Roosevelt and Truman didn't repeal the racial separation laws in the military during WWII despite the major sacrafices those people made in the effort. It wasn't until 1948...after the war and the military was being both downsized and reorganized that Truman felt it was right or safe to force this change on the military culture.

Currently we're involved in two wars that have taxed our military and we can all see how badly it needs restructuring again...but there's no way a President whose already painted by critics and the corporate media as being a neophyte and "weak" on defense and a congress that can't tie it's shoes yet take on anything this controversial. We need to get our troops home...then push for big changes throughout the military...DADT is one part, but so is reigning in contractors (if not eliminating them altogether) and detaching as much of the industrial complex that makes war a profit center.

[Chan790]

11. I think this is situationally different...

in that DADT repeal would be very very useful to the war effort.

We don't have enough perfectly-fluent translators in most tribal dialects, nor individuals with the cultural backgrounds to get turns-of-speech, slang or colloquialisms in everyday Arabic (this more than any equipment or personnel shortfall cripples the war effort)...and the US is the primary destination for asylum seekers from the Arabic world fleeing sexual-orientation-based violent persecution.

I can't tell you how many openly-gay friends I have who emigrated here and were biting at the bit to join after 9/11 as translators and military-intel only to be rejected because they were unwilling or unable to go back into the closet. Not all of their reasons were pure and noble...let's be honest, if you emigrated here because some brutal faction or regime in your hypothetical homeland burned you out of your home, killed your SO and/or tried to put you to the stone or sword for being gay...and now you have your chance at revenge by being key in their utter destruction by the most dominant military force on Earth you'd have been biting at the bit to go too. Instead we told them their service was not needed.

The JCOS fucked up in not seeking DADT repeal immediately after 9/11...a well-staffed mil-intel sector filled with individuals with native cultural and linguistic experience would have and still can do (done) more to kill Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and cripple Al Qaeda than 10 divisions of regular army will ever be able to achieve. It could run effective counter-intel operations to hamper and drown support of Al Qaeda by rogue elements of the Pakistani ISI. It could offer on-the-ground covert support for revolutionary regime change in Iran.

There was an immediate need to completely shift the focus of the intelligence community both inside and outside the military to face a threat we'd never anticipated as being the major threat to US security globally; the quickest best way to have done that was DADT repeal. It still is. We're going to be fighting wars there for the next 30 years; the time for DADT repeal is today, not tomorrow. Now.

[KharmaTrain]

12. I Fully Agree...

...but I'm not the Pentagon and their neanderthal thinking...especially since the booosh regime promoted so many religious zealots to high ranks.

The firing...or should I say the court martial and blackballing of gay translators was not only wrong it hurt this country's security in ways hard to calculate.

The upshot is DADT would have to be repealed by Congress...that's who imposed it in the first place and I don't think I need to go into how "eager" they are to take on this issue.

[shadowknows69]

10. I have news for you. The troops know who their gay brothers and sisters are

And in the thick of a firefight it doesn't matter to them one whit. I haven't seen much overt bigotry of it at all among the majority of soldiers I've met. What I have seen is the selective discharging of good and useful soldiers, including a female soldier I met who was an ARABIC TRANSLATOR, who was simply kicked out on the hearsay of someone else. The troops in large part don't give a shit who they're working with. There's more racial tension than homophobic tension. Maybe we should start DADT for bigots. Hate all you want, but first time you utter that N-Word you're gone.