This is what the military is going to do at every decision point. Get used to it. If DADT is repealed, your military will be endorsing things you would vote against. It will be endorsing things you would keep your kids away from when they’re done in public. And it will become the battleground for gay advocacy groups wanting to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which provides that the federal government recognizes only traditional marriage, and that traditional-marriage states need not recognize gay marriages concluded elsewhere.
The challenge to DOMA is already being mounted as part of the military study on repeal of DADT. It had to be. This had to happen, and it was easy to foresee long ago, which is why I predicted it last year. Gay partners will of course demand the same family services and acknowledgment of relationships that traditional families get in the military. And of course, the Defense Department will be governed in this matter by DOMA. Changing what DOD does will mean gutting DOMA or getting it overturned. However the issue is handled, it will become a precedent for every other federal agency and all the states, and is likely to generate a flood of new lawsuits.
Folks, the hue and cry to repeal DADT and push to allow open homosexuality in the military has nothing to do with military readiness. In fact, it would be detrimental to military readiness just because of all the extra bullshit the military would have to do in order to accommodate a tiny minority of the population. No, this is about pushing forward a political agenda and using the military as the battleground.
Fuck that noise.
And one final note is that that’s not because of what the military is. It’s because of what America is. If the US military could acknowledge homosexuality and yet also allow others in the ranks to believe it’s wrong and refrain from endorsing it, or even just allow them despise it, shy away from it, or crack jokes about it, as young men in particular often do, there would be no problem. That’s how some other militaries come to terms with open homosexuality: they let straights who don’t want to endorse it go their own way. This means – yes – gays sometimes get their feelings hurt. It may even mean they are discriminated against unofficially, by seniors who base judgments about them (e.g., regarding promotion) in part on their sexual orientation and lifestyle. The seniors may even be right – as they are likely to be, much of the time – and they aren’t then second-guessed as an institutional operating principle, or assumed to be wrong or to have unlawfully discriminatory “thoughts” in their heads. (None of this means gays have no recourse against being assaulted, of course; they have that because they are human beings, not because they’re gay.)
But we don’t do it that way in the USA. The reason repealing DADT must mean the military will put its institutional imprimatur on homosexuality, and require everyone in uniform to demonstrate fealty to the military’s affirmative endorsement of it, is that in the USA, we coerce institutional closed-mindedness by not only punishing thought and speech with litigation, but actively seeking thought and speech to punish.
DO NOT listen to all the shrieking about "IT'S NOT FAIR!" The military isn't about being fair, it's about winning wars. And this push to admit open homosexuality will weaken that mentality. It wouldn't be the end, it would be just the beginning. Read it all. Then print it out and mail it to your Congresscritter.
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