July 1st, 2009 at 5:25 pm

Hey, I never lambasted you for your being ab-normal! You are one of the 25%-ers who refuse to grow up and accept normal gay people as being equal to every other American, so why should the rest of the 75%-ers change the world for your minority view?

When you’ve spent some time in a barracks and see how the real men & women act, then maybe you can talk about it. Until such time, you’re simply giving your uneducated opinion on something of which you know nothing.

Yeah but who cares? I don’t like to hear about my parents having sex but it comes up sometimes.

If you choose to be the abnormal from the normal then go for it, but don’t expect the world to change for you. If men can’t be men in the barracks because there is a woman there, then she shouldn’t be there. For that same reason neither should you and you are not even a woman. Yet you still want to have you way.

July 1st, 2009 at 10:43 am

Simple solution: mandatory retirement for these “old dogs” that refuse to learn new tricks, and explain it as “detrimental to the cohesion of the military”. Since they’re so willing to exclude others for this fabricated reason, I’m sure they’ll be fine with it when it’s used on them!

July 1st, 2009 at 10:43 am

Well, I never “chose” to have heterosexuality shoved in my face when I served in the Army, but I still had to listen to all my straight cohorts extol about how they plowed one chick after another, or how they got so wasted they didn’t remember how many they slept with over the weekend.

Funny how you seem to have a double-standard about someones heterosexual “choice” of a lifestyle.

Besides gay is a choice, that can have some pretty phsycotic sub-culture associated negativities. For national security reasons, I don’t think that forcing this upon the people serving in the military is a good idea. Freedom to choose is one thing, stuffed down everyone’s throat is quite another.

I think that President Obama is doing the right thing as Commander in Chief and working to get the brass on board. I understand the feeling of urgency that people have, but I suspect that some of that energy is residue from the Bush years, and fear of being similarly stomped again.

He’s a very patient, and persuasive man who is committed to the long-term. Change that has staying power often requires more deliberation and negotiation than just barking out an order and expecting people to comply. He cannot be an effective Commander in Chief if the military brass resents him. Give him time. Whatever you think of President Obama, he is not a sociopath. He’s not just taking everyone for a ride. He really does care.

Are they going to start requiring the church to bless off on setting up a car dealership?

So when someone recently rolled out the argument that DADT couldn’t be repealed because doing so would hurt “troop morale,” they were actually saying that repealing DADT would upset the religious fundamentalist-types in the U.S. military, the very ones who’ve endangered the lives of U.S. troops overseas in combat zones by proselytizing the native people and handing our right-wing-approved versions of the Bible…which has nothing at all to do with our military’s mission…or at least didn’t when I served in the U.S. military years ago during the Vietnam Era and Cold War.

This is definitely a case where hardcore right-wing ideology trumps sanity, and actually compromises our national security, especially where Arab linguists are concerned, no matter what their sexual orientation. Neither our nation, nor our military, should be held hostage any longer to failed and dangerous right-wing religious fundamentalist quirks and judgments, which invariably do more harm, and have nothing at all to do with what Jesus Christ was teaching, nor anything to do with the founding principles of our liberal, democratic nation.

The executive branch can sign an executive order that can clarify the procedures used in following the law. For example, the original intent of DADT was that the soldier could be gay, but just not say anything to their commanding officer or other troops. The way it was implemented was that there would be “witch hunts” that the military would argue that your parents finding out was “telling” so you would be discharged.

Obama could very easily sign an executive order clarifying what is meant by “tell” and order the current cases to be re-evaluated based on that order until Congress could repeal the law

Then why can’t the churches that don’t have a problem with same-sex marriage marry people of the same sex? Why does marriage have to be defined by just a few churches?

The best solution is to make marriage available to everyone, and if a particular church doesn’t want to recognize the marriage or perform the ceremony they don’t have to.

Simple

Why do many religious organizations refer to “holy matrimony” or “holy marriage”? Doesn’t this imply that there is a separate “secular marriage” that only becomes “holy” when sanctioned by the church? So, why shouldn’t gays be able to participate in the secular marriage as part of their overall rights as human beings? Of course, I also think a church should have the right to sanction a gay marriage as “holy” also if there is truly going to be religious freedom.