The running joke on one of the gay porn message boards I moderate is "Great. Now when we go to war with North Korea I can get drafted. And, in a few years they'll legalize gay marriage and my boyfriend will start bugging me for a ring."

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Yeah, I've had a hard time not thinking, "Congratulations, it's now legal under US law for gays and lesbians to have participated in war crimes in Iraq." But your concluding thought may be more true than you think; recall that it was tens of thousands of drafted 18 year olds dying in Vietnam that turned out to be the compelling final argument for lowing the voting age from 21 to 18.

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Mari concurs

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I wouldn't say that you are full of it because you do raise a valid point. It would be great if social progress came in giant gulps but it doesn't. I try to think of it in the larger scheme of things: choice. Not every gay man or lesbian wants to serve in the military but some do and now they can without fear of reprisal because of who they happen to be attracted to.

Not every gay man or lesbian wants to get married. Should they have that choice?: Certainly. Should they have it today? Absolutely!

The bright spot is that now there is one less civil right gays and lesbians have to fight for.

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I'm thinking one thing that will come up is the military benefits that are available to heterosexual couples are not available to homosexual couples/families. It seems that this has not been an obvious, compelling argument on the state and national level (although when we started allowing same sex marriage in Iowa, the judges pointed it out), but now I think it puts a very clear picture in the minds of people who don't get it. When so many companies offer benefits to domestic partners, it was easy to ignore this issue. With the military benefits so closely intertwined with family relations, it's very, very obvious. Medical benefits, educational, housing, travel, PX/BX, commissary, the list goes on.

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yeah, id want the good rights, not the right to get shot.

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Rights come in bundles. You don't get the "good" rights without the "bad." The hope and the history is that it works the other way, too.

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The point is that there are people who are compelled to serve their country in the military. In the current atmosphere, I don't get it, but it's a fact of life. And gay people are not immune. They've been serving for ever - even though they were always at risk of losing everything at a moment's notice if they were outed. Now they don't have that to worry about. Many may still stay closeted, but now they can come out (or be outed) without fear of being involuntarily discharged.

And every place that we can be treated as normal human beings brings us one step closer to having gay not be such a big damn deal.

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Compelled? Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding but does the US still have the draft?

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No argument there. Yes, it's a good thing. More rights = better, but I agree that with the way this country abuses homosexuals I'm shocked that any are willing to serve it at all. I guess that makes them better people than I am.

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The entire country is not persecuting homosexuals.

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"Congratulations! You can now die to defend a country that won't let you get married. Well done."

"We'll let you die for us first. Then we'll see about treating you like human beings."

You should Tweet these.

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Without context, it could be taken wrong. And I'd prefer not to have it taken like that.

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I see your point and understand it. But it is a step forward, and unfortunately, that's what it takes to make progress: one step at a time. This one is a big step, I think, because the military serves a role beyond "kill or die for your country" -- many people often look to the military as exemplars. Leaders. Role models. And when military leadership itself embraces the gay community -- and the military can be quite homophobic when encountered in pockets -- then it's a signal to the rest of the country that perhaps they, too, can and ought to do the same.

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Without DADT though, doesn't it mean that, if they want, they now CAN ask and toss people out? Isn't it actually a bit worse now until they change military regulations? I wonder how long that will take, and wouldn't it be really fucked up if someone along the line holds it up?

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I found a post at:
http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4559

The meat of it, to me is this:

" Even after the repeal bill is signed into law by the president, the "don't ask, don't tell" strictures will remain in place until the White House and Pentagon certify a plan to minimize disruption on the services.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he would not do that until the service chiefs are confident the moves will not disrupt combat operations, and refused to set any specific timeline on how long that might take. "

Unless I'm reading that wrong, it means that the heads of the various branches of the military could hold things up until, or unless someone above them actually pins them down and orders it to happen in a specific time frame.

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I can think of no relevant way that this is different from any other expansionist change in the military, the two examples which spring to mind being women and minorities.

Which is not to say that you're wrong, just that it's happened before.

-Alex

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There is a difference, in that closeted gays could be there when they weren't allowed, or protected. Much smaller subsets of minorities and women could ever do that, and I'm not sure it's possible in the modern military for a woman to fake being a man. In most cases it is easier to fake being straight.

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"We'll let you die for us first. Then we'll see about treating you like human beings."

I'm sure African-Americans in some parts of the country are *still* feeling this way. You've got to start somewhere, and the US military is an important place because it has branches in all 50 states, and yet has a centralized control point.

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Last night, while the debate was still on, I said something similar to my mom: "If Republicans hate gay people, shouldn't they want them to go into the military and get shot so there are less of them?"

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Kind of reminds me of a huge protest a couple years back. I don't recall the exact context but I remember there was a lot of news coverage of small business owners protesting about wanting the right to refuse service to gay people. My only reaction was "And why is people giving you money a bad thing, again?"

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Never mind the gays, I can't wait till we see women fighting on the frontline at the next global conflict ;)

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They already do, in many countries.

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The military, more than most places, is a forced aggregation point. That is, you can choose the community you live in, who you go to church with, even to a certain extent your coworkers.

You don't get to choose your coworkers in the military.

That's a large cross-section of people who are going to have their brothers in arms, seeing that gays aren't so bad as people. The more people you know of a group, the less likely you'll be able to discriminate against them.

That said, I'd rather have marriage. :)

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What do you know, people suck. It's always difficult to simultaneously celebrate a big step forward while remembering that the overall situation is still unnaceptable. It's certainly ironic that some of the most double-edged rights arrive first, but its inherent in any emancipation that they have to come sooner or later, and having them is an important step to point to "we stepped forward to serve my country, but it won't let us marry. Is that fair...?".

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Two steps forward. When DADT was originally implemented, repealing it meant going to back to "asking", ie, kicking out anyone accused of homosexuality. Including lots of straights who'd pissed someone off and were falsely accused.

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That's an interesting perspective.

I have a few gay friends who served in the military. They all have fond memories of their service.

I like what John Waters said: "I'm for an all-volunteer lesbian army. I'd feel so comfortable at home knowing my sisters were out there kicking ass."

(Pause)

"They could find bin Laden."

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I've been thinking about the issues you raised since last night as well. I guess . . .we have to start somewhere. Potentially, having same sex partner benefits through the military would be a big win towards the marriage front, but I don't think we've gotten there yet.

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::shrug:: Honestly? Making it safer to be gay in the military (which, in my view, is what this is about) is more important to me than marriage rights. Don't get me wrong, I want both to happen, they're both important, but there are just too many horror stories...

Bah. I should have known not to try to make a point when I'm feeling blah... Will come back to this at a later time. For now, I recommend watching 'Soldier's Girl', a true story of one such tragedy. The young man in question's family became leading activists in the fight against DADT.

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The same basic question was asked during the Vietnam era. "You want us to go die but you won't let us vote?" And thus, after the usual right-wing heel-digging, the 26th Amendment was passed, changing the age of voting to 18. (A personal side effect was that my younger brother got to vote before I did in the 1972 elections.)

I doubt it'll take a constitutional amendment this time, just the repeal of the patently unconstitutional "defense of marriage act."

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I quoted you btw.

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Yep.

Bisexual, raised pacifist, not as pacific as I feel I ought to be. Great for the people who actually want to serve. One in the face for the various homophobes. Absolutely needed for the protection of my fellows who are in there. But still it's a military.

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Draw possible parallels to black soldiers?

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The problem with gays in the military that DADT nor it's repeal will solve is that most military servicemen are pretty macho types. They don't want to be serving alongside homosexuals and bisexuals anymore than they want to be serving alongside women.

Serving in the military as a homosexual asks you to willingly take on a job where the majority of your coworkers are hostile to your presence. Even if they are technically required to tolerate you, they will still make your life miserable and possibly worse. Life or death situations, firefights, fragging, missing on shoreleave, man overboard, accidents happen, fall back and forget to tell you...

The military is a place so macho they will beat you in basic training (with soap in pillows, for hiding the evidence) to make you either work harder or quit, while the officers look the other way.

Maybe in a generation...

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If we can't trust our soldiers not to shoot their own men, then we need to kick 'em out.

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I'd be wary of revealing an aspect of myself which had only just been "allowed" in a given environment. If an act of government could permit it, another act of government could take it away again, and if I'd outed myself in the meantime, where would that leave me?

I'd be more likely to think "I'll wait a while - like maybe two, three generations - until it's become a solid and accepted part of the national culture."

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That seems unlikely in this case, though. Obama can veto, the Senate can filibuster, etc. It would take a larger swing to the right than is likely to happen. Also, this sort of issue rarely gets revisited. I don't see any campaign for kicking african-americans out of the military gaining steam.

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