Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Heats Up
Yesterday afternoon Jason Bellini of The Daily Beast said that gay rights leaders had made a deal to wait on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. He said that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “let slip” to a number of gay leaders that the Human Rights Campaign told him that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not the White House’s priority:
Last night Andy Towle got another statement from HRC denying the report:
“This story is not only an outright lie, it is recklessly irresponsible. HRC never made such a deal and continues to work with congress and the administration on a full range of equality issues including a swift end to the military’s shameful ban on gay servicemembers.”
Pam Spaulding is among those activists who have about had it with HRC. She wants action and details the goings on of recent days. Chris Crain thinks they doth protest too much. (Towle’s take here.)
Meanwhile, early this afternoon Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.), President Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of the Army, told Roll Call’s Jennifer Bendery that he will support the president’s position on repealing DADT:
“I have no interest as either a Member of Congress or as … secretary of the Army to exclude by some categorization a group of people otherwise qualified to serve,” McHugh told Roll Call.
He noted that the Armed Services Committee has not considered the policy “in any formal way” since 1993. In the meantime, “certainly, the recruiting-age population’s views have changed on that whole matter,” he said.
Still, McHugh said he will refrain from giving his personal view on the policy until he is called into Senate confirmation hearings. “I want to defer to them. They have that right. To respond before they ask, I think, is disrespectful,” he said.
So the question’s not if but when. You’ve got to wonder if McHugh had seen this from Gallup:
Americans are six percentage points more likely than they were four years ago to favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military, 69% to 63%. While liberals and Democrats remain the most supportive, the biggest increase in support has been among conservatives and weekly churchgoers — up 12 and 11 percentage points, respectively.
Emphasis mine.
It’s hard not to see that DADT and marriage equality interrelate. Can we justify giving gay people the obligatory “right” to serve, while at the same time depriving them of the benefits of marriage? My guess is that once the American public sees and accepts lesbian and gay people serving openly in the military, their support for marriage equality will follow closely behind. Neither is very far away.
9 Responses to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Heats Up”
First you have to buy that a group of otherwise completely unrelated people, who only share in common a certain type of acquired sexual-fetish behaviors actually constitute an innate “minority group”.
Then from there you decide if allowing their fetish to be advertised in squadrons of usually same-gendered people in stressful close conditions is strategically a good idea.
If yes is the answer to both those issues, then Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be repealed. But if no is the answer to either one, then it should stay in place.
Logic is beautiful in its simplicity.
Sil, it seems no matter how many of your premises I accept for the sake of argument, your conclusions never make sense. Is there ever a point where your reasoning starts to stand on its own, or is it just a big slippery pole for you to dance up and down on?
Suppose we agree that homosexuality is a fetish. You may disclose your fondness for tickling or latex or–naughty girl that you are–spanking, without getting thrown out of the army. So why must homosexuality be persecuted?
I hope you're not going to claim homosexuality is different in that its practitioners flaunt it more, because that would go against your first premise, that they're not a cohesive minority. Truth be told, that premise was on the rocks from the start. Gays are certainly not a majority, and they're cohesive enough to scare the beJesus into plenty of heterosexuals.
As for “innate,” well, perhaps you'd better pin that term down. Your position so far is that human sexuality is malleable, except when it gets to the point where it's not. Does that mean it becomes “innate”? How does “innateness” help decide questions of individual freedom and equality anyway?
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I would argue if Christian servicemen can be “gay” for Jesus and try to shove it down others throats – why can't a gay serviceman mention his boyfriend?
Then again when GWB was president – I was happy about my special right to avoid the possible draft.
How is the fact that as a girl I fell in love with other girls and as a woman fell (and fall) in love with other women “an acquired sexual-fetish behavior?”
Because sex and love are different. I loved my grandmother deeply, and my best friend. Yet never did I feel the slightest urge or compulsion to have sex with them.
Shocker huh? Sexual-preference is all about conditioning, pairing the powerful endorphines with sexual release with a given set of environmental stimuli. That's how come some people develop really bizarre fetishes. No one in their right mind would associate “love” with a shoe, or tying themselves up, or trying to hang themselves while masturbating. Only people who have been “trained”, “rewired” to receive physical pleasure in these ways would do such things. Homosexuality is just another form of an acquired association of orgasm and “object”…whatever that may be, in gays' case, the same gender.
Spend some time helping ranch managers train bulls to mount steers by creating the association between steers, instead of cows, to the endorphines they release at climax. Once you see a horny bull who otherwise but for purposeful training would run to cows, instead only run to steers for release…you'll get it.. With humans, frustration can be a powerful “trainer”. Essentially what ranchers do is purposefully frustrate a bull with an estrus cow nearby and when his natural erection and mounting behavior kick in automatically, they divert it to a steer and after just a few times of this, the bull associates “release” with “steer” instead of “cow'. That's how classical conditioning works. Don't believe me? Ask Pavlov..
Love isn't sex. Sex isn't love. One does not necessarily mean the other. Sexuality is a malleable thing and creates all sorts of fetishes in differing conditions.
“No one in their right mind would associate “love” with a shoe, or tying themselves up, or trying to hang themselves while masturbating. Only people who have been “trained”, “rewired” to receive physical pleasure in these ways would do such things.”
A few data points:
1. Millions of people have all manner of fetishes they were presumably conditioned to enjoy.
2. They nevertheless don't confuse their fetishes with love.
3. Millions of homosexuals do believe they're in love.
So, how do you square these with your belief that homosexuality is just another fetish? Are there a bunch of shoe-fetish-rights groups who do are equally confused but do lower-key lobbying than the gays? Is everyone in group 3 coincidentally out of their minds, and you're the one sane enough to see the truth?
“First you have to buy that a group of otherwise completely unrelated people, who only share in common a certain type of acquired sexual-fetish behavior actually constitute an innate, cohesive “minority group”.”
No rational person is required to consider for a single moment anything based a premise so flawed as that homosexuality (or heterosexuality or bisexuality, for that matter) is an “acquired sexual-fetish behavior.” You're begging the question shamelessly, and wearing your bias like a bonnet in the Easter parade.
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