Military Gay Ban

[beth]

Military tells Congress to keep gay ban for now



WASHINGTON (AP) - Senior Pentagon leaders on Friday warned Congress not to tamper with the ban on gays serving openly in the military until he can come up with a plan for dealing with potential opposition in the ranks.

In a strongly worded letter obtained by The Associated Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen told the House Armed Services Committee that forcing policy changes on the military before it's ready would be a mistake.

"Our military must be afforded the opportunity to inform us of their concerns, insights and suggestions if we are to carry out this change successfully," Gates and Mullen wrote to the panel's chairman, Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton.

Gay rights advocates want legislation this year that would freeze military firings of openly gay service members, and some senior Democratic senators have said they want to offer such a bill.

But other lawmakers, including Skelton, have said they are uneasy about lifting the ban and don't want to act before the force is ready.

The letter provides Skelton and other unsettled Democrats political cover not to press the issue until after this year's midterm elections. Earlier this week, Skelton asked Gates in a letter to outline his views as the House committee prepares the 2011 defense authorization bill.

President Barack Obama has said the 1993 law, known as "don't ask, don't tell," unfairly punishes patriotic Americans and asked Congress to repeal it.

Gates says he supports lifting the ban but wants to survey the troops first on how it should be done. He has ordered a study by Dec. 1 that will look at whether housing arrangements would have to be altered and gay partners would be allowed military benefits.

If Congress acts before then, "it would send a very damaging message to our men and women in uniform that in essence their views, concerns and perspectives do not matter," he and Mullen wrote to Skelton.

The letter prompted immediate protests from gay rights groups.

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said that if Congress doesn't act this year it would send the message to gay troops that "the impact on them and their families does not matter to the military leadership, including their commander in chief."

Defense officials hope the protracted timeline will also help troops adjust to the idea of serving with openly gay colleagues before they have to accept the change.

Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, is expected to propose in the 2011 defense authorization bill a moratorium on gay firings in the military.

In the House, Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa., is considered the most likely to offer the legislation.

apnews.myway.com/article/20100430/D9FDLDA80.html

[iamjumbo]

the don't ask, don't tell is bad enough. NO normal person wants to be in a foxhole with a fool that he has to worry about trying to suck his d..k rather than shooting at the azzholes attacking them

[alanseago]

I think foxholes are rather a thing of the past, as is John Wayne. I have associates and relatives who are gay, they do not make advances any more than my female relatives do. Just like heterosexuals, they spend most of their time concentrating on other things.
Could you be left in a closed room with a woman?

[iamjumbo]

May 2, 2010 8:36:24 GMT -5 alanseago said:

I think foxholes are rather a thing of the past, as is John Wayne. I have associates and relatives who are gay, they do not make advances any more than my female relatives do. Just like heterosexuals, they spend most of their time concentrating on other things.
Could you be left in a closed room with a woman?

no similarity. if i weren't attached, there would be no problem is she wanted to get it on. there is a definite problem, for him, if a gay male did
for the record, an armored personnel carrier is even more restrictive than a foxhole

[Deleted]

I am in principle deeply opposed to homosexuality which I regard as a loathsome and unnatural perversion.

On the other hand, homosexuality in the military is not the recent phenomenon some people claim.

Alexander the Great had a number of homosexual relationships and in military situations, as in prisons, monastic institutions and other similarly artificial settings, sometimes sexual behaviour deviates from the normal.

[Deleted]

Who really cares about one's sexual orientation or not?

I believe it's time to stop discriminating against gays in the miliatry and be thankful there are men and women willing to sacrafice their life for our freedoms.

[iamjumbo]

May 2, 2010 11:04:50 GMT -5 @mikemarshall said:

I am in principle deeply opposed to homosexuality which I regard as a loathsome and unnatural perversion.

On the other hand, homosexuality in the military is not the recent phenomenon some people claim.

Alexander the Great had a number of homosexual relationships and in military situations, as in prisons, monastic institutions and other similarly artificial settings, sometimes sexual behaviour deviates from the normal.

yeah, but in those days, they fought with swords, so it's possible that they didn't know what they were getting stuck with. what was really sad was that their armor only covered their front, not their back

[beth]

I agree with Chef.

What she said x 2.

[iamjumbo]

May 2, 2010 11:42:51 GMT -5 @chefmate said:

Who really cares about one's sexual orientation or not?

I believe it's time to stop discriminating against gays in the miliatry and be thankful there are men and women willing to sacrafice their life for our freedoms.

no one does care, military or otherwise, as long as they don't broadcast their degeneracy

[Erasmus]

I believe in don't ask don't tell. Does religion matter in the military? Does vegetarianism? Does whether you prefer cheese to pork to fish? Does it matter if you get fetish thrills out of wetting yourself or masturbating in plastic pants? So why should this ridiculous justification of prejudice against one sex or the other? Did it worry Alexander the Great? You could say that for his world, gay was the norm and only sissies wanted to be around the women necessary to breed sons. What did that do for his plans on world conquest? What did it do for the Spartans?

There are still countries with conscript armies. Do they let anybody off for not being hetero enough? There are claims from the US forces (but no others) that women are subject to sexual harassment from men. I suspect that men are subject to sexual harassment from men too, who by some perverse reasoning I have suffered from too often, believe that the more they harass a man they do not want to admit they have taken a fancy too, the more they get the excuse to beat him up and rape him for the insult of implying they might be homosexual, or to rape him and beat him up for the insult of accepting their homosexual advances.

There are plenty of each sex out there brought up to despise the other so much that they can only really feel any respect and emotional rapport with their own and utterly despise the other sex - in fact used to be the required cultural norm - but resent the shame they feel at not being able to separate physical from emotional.

Assuming there are any foxholes left, what possible difference can it make to know that the partner you are depending on to cover you is married? Regardless of whether that is married in the traditional sense to their other sex, or to their own?

[Wonder Woman]

May 2, 2010 8:22:11 GMT -5 iamjumbo said:

the don't ask, don't tell is bad enough. NO normal person wants to be in a foxhole with a fool that he has to worry about trying to suck his d..k rather than shooting at the azzholes attacking them

No one sitting in a foxhole, being shot at or waiting to be shot at, is looking at his or her comrades as a potential sex partner. They're ALL worried about staying alive ~ and keeping one another alive. And, IMO, anyone who thinks just because someone is homosexual is only ever looking to stick 'it' to someone is either very misinformed ~~ or perhaps speaking from the experience of his or her own lust over life.

[Erasmus]

Perhaps more gay men in the US military would mean fewer female military in Iraq saying they dare not even go to the toilet alone because too many males won't just refuse to take No for an answer, but don't think it necessary to ask in the first place. But then I recall most of last year being told (by among others one notorious self-confessed Lesbian feminist) that I must be some sort of of mad pervert to imagine anything abnormal or morally wrong about even wanting sex on such terms, and perfectly acceptable to go ahead knowing the 'partner' to be unwilling as long as she has stopped putting up an actual fight and acquiesced to the inevitable.

[beth]

There's quite a push going on right now to convince Pres. Obama to spearhead legislation to end "don't ask, don't tell". There was a demonstration on Lafayette Square, in front of the WH, 10 days ago led by Howard Dean and Dan Choi.

Good information in this news story. I'd encourage anyone interested in the issue to access and read it.

www.ontopmag.com/article.aspx?Category=25&id=5667&MediaType=1

[Erasmus]

I don't understand why people want to put restrictive labels on themselves that say I can't have an intimate relationship with any but my own sex/race/religion or I can't with any who are of the same sex/race/religion as me, and because of that I will avoid getting into any position that might tempt me otherwise. Are homosexual relationships so devastatingly superior that they prevent ever having heterosexual ones and turn one into a homosexual incapable for ever of heterosexuality?

Heterosexual relationships do not have that power, according to gay-bashers and gay activists alike. It sounds remarkably like the immensely powerful Black (or Jewish) Blood capable of making a person Black or Jewish if only one ancestor eight generations back was. One homosexual experience makes you a Homosexual no longer capable of heterosexuality, while no amount of heterosexual experience is certainty against the dread homosexual experience - even unwilling - that might make you a Homosexual. Does that make women who use vibrators Technosexuals?

Somehow these things always end up applying to men much more than to women. A woman not interested in sex with every man who fancies her can be both a social ideal of respectability and homosexual - but need not be - and a woman can admit to intimate loving relationship with other women without excluding men. As with so many things, men do not get sexual freedom equal with women. It is homosexual men who are constantly spoken of, not Lesbians: the usual sexist discrimination.