Cowboy Confessional

Take a trip into San Francisco’s Castro district – where people are so gay they border on ecstatic – and inquire about homosexuals serving in the United States military.  You will get a handful … of predictable responses.

“Gays can catch bullets as well as straights, so we deserve to serve.”

“You mean I get to go camping with a bunch of hunky boys?  Oooooh!”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing khaki.”

You can tell a contentious and complicated issue by how well the media muddles the story through over simplification.  Such was the recent case when America’s armed services released a study on the repeal of Bill “Bang the Fat Broad” Clinton’s “don’t ask and don’t speak with a lisp” policy.  Part of the study was a survey, which was all the media focus on, ignoring 100+ pages of other important information.  In a rush to defend the right to die in Gawd forsaken hell holes around the globe, the media skimmed the survey section of the report looking for anything that might vindicate equal rights for equal-butt-opposite sexual orientations.  Such skimming naturally led them to miss important stuff, like combat soldiers not being too fond of having potential paramours in their foxhole … or any other hole for that matter.

For those who have not surfed this particular policy orifice, there are two critical issues:

A) The right of any American to travel the world in order to meet and kill interesting people.

B) The cohesiveness of combat units (not those units, you pervs).

Readers with functioning dendra realize a nation cannot achieve A without B, which is a violation of A.  Repeat that thought loop until dizzy.

For whatever historical or functional reasons, having homosexuals in their squads does not make men in combat roles happy, much less gay (we must contrast combat troops from logistics specialists, paper pushers, doctors in German hospitals and sailors slapping paint on hulls in Norfolk).  This is one major defect of the survey (and having formal education and experience in survey design, I found many problems with the methodology of this particular poll) – in many places there were amalgamations of opinions of combat vets, non-combat support personnel, and even spouses not serving themselves.

That being uttered, there were divisions between active duty folks who carried rifles and those who pushed paper.

One such instance showed that 70% of military members (minds out of the gutter, readers) who have been combat deployed since 9/11 felt an openly gay/lesbian person would have negative effectiveness on their unit’s ability to complete its mission (44% felt it would be negative or very negative, and the rest said it would be both positive and negative).  Their pessimism fell a bit when the theoretical situation changed from merely being in the field to crisis response or actual combat, though 30% still thought unit effectives would be impacted.

Questions concerning improved moral by having fabulous new uniforms were not asked.

Ignored by the media entirely was that 27% of military personal and families thought that repealing “don’t ask, don’t squeal like a pig” would reduce their willingness to recommend joining.  Queer, isn’t it?  Assuming (and I doubt it is a misplaced assumption) that keeping the policy would not have a similar effect, there is a significant risk in future readiness – if nearly 30% of the positive promotion from servicemen and women disappeared, a similar number of new recruits would evaporate … unless the Pentagon opened a recruiting station next to Moby Dick.  Then it would indeed be man’s Army.

As regrettable as unequal opportunity to bleed and die may be, all such freedoms vanish if the country does.  Military readiness, which depends significantly on field cohesion, must be preserved.  Attitudes about gays and lesbians are changing – homos are increasingly less likely to be beaten to death from Fort Worth to Fargo.  Even combat vets are softening up (though their sphincters won’t unclench until discharge).  For example, the same survey reveals that servicemen/women, who believe that one of their unit’s members is batting for the other team, have fewer doubts about the policy repeal’s impact on unit effectiveness, cohesion and readiness – though the rate of negative impact from repealing the current policy remains higher than the stuffing in a drag queen’s bra.

The moment to repeal “don’t ask, don’t bend over” is coming, but the moment is not yet.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Friday, December 10th, 2010 at 9:29 am and is filed under Constitution, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.