The 111th (lame duck) Congress did a few good things this past week. My favorite – from a center-right frame of mind – was that the 111th repealed the rather prehistoric “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.
Call me crazy, but I do not understand the logic behind turning down an able-bodied man or woman who is offering to surrender his or her life for you and me and this progressive country purely on this basis of sexual inclination. In my mind, it is criminal to deny any person the right to serve their country on the basis of a personal preference that is totally remote from the mental decision to give up life and livelihood.
Argue with me, please, but do not give me the extremely bogus attraction/distraction argument. (You know, the argument that says that a homosexual soldier might fall down on the job because they are attracted by the soldier next to them.) If you want to cling to this argument, then women should have never entered the workforce after WWII… Walk around any corporate headquarters, or any congressional office, for that matter, there is sexual tension everywhere. This is where acting like an adult is supposed to kick in – and in most cases it does.
A few basic thoughts.
News flash: Sex is everywhere, and barely in the bedrooms of monogamous couples.
News flash: Signing up for the military is not like signing up for match.com. With the military, you are signing up to potentially die (from actual fire), as opposed to signing up for potentially getting laid.
News flash: I am not alone in my views regarding the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. A recent Gallup poll (read it here) suggests that the majority of Americans share the same point of view on DADT. The polls shows that while many are still struggling with the line to draw on gay marriage, the majority understand the inherent stupidity guised behind DADT.
Ok, please hear me out here. I think the military has a larger issue to deal with at the moment than that of the sexual preference of its troops. And that, the larger issue, is the current and growing suicide rate amongst service members. The Army alone is losing one per day. Yes, one per day, and you can read about it in USA Today here. Why is it that these men and woman are taking their own lives at such eye-raising rates? Clearly it’s not because the military is just that awesome. I’d be curious to know if Wall Street is taking lives at a similar rate.
This brings us down to a pretty simple bottom line. And that is this: At the end of the day, the question we should be asking is whether our brothers and sisters are going to come out of the war zone alive, well, unsuicidal and OK – as opposed to whether they come out gay or not gay.
Sarah Lenti is the blogger behind NMPolitics.net’s The Savvy. E-mail her at sarah@nmpolitics.net.