Comments on: Obama tucks tail on “don’t ask don’t tell”

By: Stan Moore

Stan Moore — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:54:37 +0000

Did y’all notice what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defence and even Dick Cheney said on “don’t ask, don’t tell” within the past ten days? Methinks they are actually giving enough cover for Barack Obama to forever remove the policy, if he really wants to.

I was amazed that Dick Cheney said it was a “generational thing”, recognizing that military culture would likely be much more able to absorb the change now than even a decade earlier.

[redacted sentence... think before you write]

Stan Moore

By: Curt Kastens

Curt Kastens — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:59:53 +0000

Admiral Mullen deserves a pain in the ass. This murderer picks up a bunch of points with some leftists beacuse he supports allowing gays and lesbians equal access to take part in unjust wars. I say that every gay and lesbian in the military today should be kicked out of the military along with every straight member of the military unless they have a get out of jail free card signed by the Russian or Iranian or Cuban or Venezualan Ministe of Defence. A real pain in the ass like colon cancer. No no that is not extreme enough, aggitation fever, Ja that is it. Aggitation fever, he needs a dose of that.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:13:48 +0000

How about allowing transgendered people into the army for that matter?

By: Stan

Stan — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:09:05 +0000

It’s a mixed bag.

The Pentagon implememnted a desegregation order handed down from Truman, and created a genuinely desegregated military far faster than the civilian sector accomplished desegregation… which hasn’t been accomplished yet, six-and-a-half decades later. There are cases where autocracy works. Not a comforting thought, and certianly contradictory in ways too numerous to count, but there it is…

Here’s one of the many many stories today on don’t ask don’t tell (Google-news it):

According to the official, the idea of separate housing or showers was not considered a serious possibility, but would be discussed in order to rule it out…

FULL

I like this pull quote because it gets to the meat of the matter, pun intended. Men’s fear of being sexually objectified (whether it is rational or not) has a ideational-emotional resonance that strikes at the very heart of gender as a system of power. Gay marriage and official military homophobia are intellectual breaches that have to be exploited for the sake of the conversations that will follow.

Liberals will want to evade the shower issue and keep it abstract, but that is precisely where the focus needs to be. We need a lot of people debating the topic of ‘straight’ MEN! taking collective showers with gay men.

We ought to be raising debates like: Why is being in the showers with a homosexual a problem? This is how we can get under the most visceral crawlspaces of gender.

It’s important.

BTW, it will be interesting to see what the Pentagon’s plan looks like, though it may be concerned mostly with implementation. The point of my initial rant is that Obama could stop the investigations and discharges TODAY, and he doesn’t. Almost 14,000 people now have ‘bad paper’ following them around after being run out of this federal employment using this law.

By: Michael Anderson

Michael Anderson — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:00:25 +0000

The thing I can’t figure out yet is; the military has gone WAY down the road of the Iliad, hypermasculinity, and fascism in general. What’s keeping them from dumping this stupid (in any normal part of society) policy and just going all the way? Perhaps I should amend this to “sarcasm in context”.