Robert Gates: Military “Too Busy” to Stop Persecuting Gays and Lesbians
Matthew Yglesias’s response just nails it:
It’s simply the nature of the military that this “a lot on our plates right now” excuse will almost always be available. In retrospect, the 1990s were a period of relative peace and quiet for the military, but at the time it was seen as a stressful period of multiple deployments (to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia) around the world mixed with efforts at containment in the Gulf and the Korean peninsula. The Joint Chiefs are never going to say “eh . . . we don’t really have much going on these days.”
Meanwhile, racial desegregation of the military actually required a large number of active steps and was successfully carried out near the peak of Cold War tensions. The biggest step toward ending discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military would be the passive step of just not discriminating against them. Gay and lesbian soldiers are already serving. Gates could just decide that with as much on his plate as he has at the moment, he’ll make sure we stop persecuting them.
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6 Responses to “Robert Gates: Military “Too Busy” to Stop Persecuting Gays and Lesbians”
The real reason “Don't Ask, Don't Tell' hasn't been de-commissioned is for the simple reason that Obama knows America is very conservative still on these issues and the military also doesn't want to change it. Obama is shying from the unflattering publicity he'll get for ramming it through just like Bill Clinton experienced in 1993. I support the policy staying in place.
[...] That’s not what “persecution” means I think. [...]
What's Hillary Clinton doing? She's the secretary of state. Have you ever stopped to think that it's not Gates and the military that can put an end to this? In Islam it's forbidden to be gay. It's far, far worse for gays in Islamic countries than any Western country (and Israel which is in the East too). Only the west and Israel are more open to homosexuals.
If you want to see an end to this, you need an Islamic reformation.
Don't get me wrong. This makes me want to throw up. This should not happen to innocent gay men.
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