There is a Heterosexual Problem in America.
And yet, today: how refreshing--
Senator Joe Lieberman [CT] did not, today, at least, anneal his nose firmly to Arizona's John McCain's buttocks when he sponsored the Senate repeal of Don't-Ask/Don't Tell. He and a solid majority of Senators on the Armed Service Committee, including Maine Republican Susan Collins, voted to rid us of our DADT shame and to put us in league (though not yet on a par with) other nations, most notably Israel, who have incredibly robust miltaries and no need to hide behind embarrassing excuses to deny themselves the patriotism and military skills of gay people, excuses such as "readiness", "unit cohesion", and "morale".
The House of Representatives last night voted to repeal DADT 234-194 . [See how your Representative voted, below.] The Senate yes-votes included five Republicans. The full Senate will now take up the measure. The Pentagon will as yet have to certify DADT's ditching and will likely do so by winter. While the Senate measure will very likely pass, most Republicans and a few Democrats will fight it.
Let's be clear. Despite the rightness of the current legislation, all of these psychic gyrations have nothing, nothing whatever to do with gay people, civilian or military. This ridiculous, shameful, and unnecessary national display has everything and solely to do with a special insanity of straight people in America.
I recall in the mid-60s 'Ebony' published a watershed piece called "The White Problem in America". It turned on its head the usual articulation. And of course that was right: there was no so-called Black Problem. There never was.
The problem, the cultural craziness, was White.
The reason Dr. King penned his searing essay 'Why We Can't Wait' was precisely because people, White and Black, had been telling him that (White) America was just not ready for equality under law. The foolishness was that 100 years after Dixie went down to overwhelming, devastating, and justified defeat, White people still needed time to adjust to the idea that Blacks were fully human and should be fully integrated into American life. Dr. King knew that was a vicious lie and a slap to Whites as well as to Blacks.
[I have no doubt, by the way, that had he lived, Dr. King would have transcended the then-and-now prevalent anti-gay rights sentiments in religious Black communities--look at the Black vote to repeal gay marriage in California as just one example. Had he lived it is possible that gay marriage would not have been repealed there. I cannot prove it, of course, yet I am clear-as-a-bell I'm right.]
So too is it a lie to suggest that any area of our national life needs 'adjustment time' to properly integrate gays.
There is a Heterosexual Problem in America.
Catering to it, in any way, any longer, especially in the military--the institution we historically associate most immediately with manhood and patriotism--only further encourages the insanity.
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Max Rivlin-Nadler
Linda Seccaspina
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Comments
You see WE don't care who YOU str8 folks love and marry. You can hold hands any place you want, we don't care and we won't beat you up or spit on you for doing it. You can live and do whatever you like, all with our blessing. We will even stay out of your bedrooms, churches and synagogues.
You're right, JW, it's a problem that you str8 people need to deal with, but us queer folks sure wish you'd get to it (AND get the hell over your str8 selves.) Good post.
Lezlie
It's always been a mystery to me why straight people care. Whose damned business is it anyway.
You tell people enough times that they will need a long time to adjust, they will begin to 'know' it's true, even though that person just insulted you by telling you that you're an idiot that can't have a random thought of your own. It' slike telling minorities that employers 'must' have a number of minority leaders or they will sue for them. basically they are told they don't have to try b/c 'we' know they can't do it on thier own.
I understood the DADT when it came out. A baby step to normalcy. I 'assumed' it would last 5 years tops, but then it just kept going and going and a good idea became a dumb idea.
Glad it's done. And I know a few Vets that are very glad.
As happy as I am for the repeal of DADT, I fear that it is merely a symbolic "ripping up" of the rule. As you said, the problem lies with the heterosexual members of the armed forces, who, for some insane reason, believe that a gay soldier will not be courageous enough to save the lives of his fellow brothers in battle. The older I get, the more ashamed I am of us as a people.
R
On the other hand, it would be great to think those same heteros could also learn to stop this rape problem we have. One of three women in the armed services come back victims of rape, sexual assault and battery, compounding the trauma of war. Maybe they can lift the unofficial DADT that has been imposed on them as well.
With all due respect, and ya know I love ya man, but I wish you had gotten to the real, root cause of this issue. It's not a heterosexual problem. it's a religious problem.
The greater majority of heteros have, and have always had something of a "don't ask, don't care" problem with gays. But with the Naval Academy practically being a funnel system for the clergy and the rampant evangelicalism of the military in general, it is the Evangelical Christians, who have money and power, who are putting up the greatest resistance to this.
It's also an anti-intellectual problem. The basic argument against gays in the military (and I watched a guy on C-span say this last night) is "our good hearted heterosexual sons and daughters will be afraid..."
Well, hell, if they are YOUR sons and daughters, then you only have yourself to blame for their ignorance, apathy and hatred.
Thanks for setting us "straight"!
On a more serious note, are you well read enough on the subject to explore the history of homophobia in the Western and Judaeo-Christian traditions? I have something to say about that but will reserve for the moment (must get BACK TO WORK!)
:)
Replace DADT with STFU.
It's nice to finally be headed in the right direction.
Rated.
There is another poster on this site that agrees with you and scanner as well:
http://open.salon.com/blog/sandy_fox/2010/03/27/headline_mari
ne_commandant_afraid_of_those_scary_fags
What is it?
Rated.
needaseller. com
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However, I can't help think that Barack "no gay marriage" Obama has "gotten religion" at a curious moment--when a professional review of the impact of repeal of the policy is in progress but unfinished. I think it's pretty clear that this suddenly awakening interest in DADT is clearly intended as a distraction from the many current failures and embarrassments of the Obama Administration--oil spill, Brennan, Clinton, and, most recently waffling about whether the U.S. should support the U.K. in its rising dispute with Argentina, or rather go with the likes of Hugo Chavez.
It's as if Obama is saying, "Well, you have to admit that I'm right at least on THIS."
Also congratulations on making the front cover of Open Salon.com
Kudos to the editors and most of all to you!
In terms of the article itself, it's always been I believe a problem with people who judge others unfairly. I think women are such a powerful species that this is why men are threatened by them and condemn them.
It is the same as you said with blacks. The white man condemned him/her because he was threatened and found so many positive qualites in the race; qualities that he had to deny for fear of "being taken over by the black man."
Finally with gays, the male ego is often threatened and homophobic
because of its' own insecurities. I have also heard of people who do not like gays because they are repressed homosexuals. Again, it's the same thing.
That saying "he who casts the first stone..." I believe applies here.
Again,
Buddy
It's the shape and the smell, and the taste.
That being said, I don't care who anybody sleeps with so long as they don't cause a ruckus.
SING OUT LOUISE!!!!!!
Being a gay, reasonably liberal Hispanic immigrant myself, one thinks I should take offense at Lammi's post. It is, however, sadly true. In those issues, at least, Hispanics and Blacks are being led by the nose by their worst enemies.
Not only I agree, but I think his widow already answered that question to everybody's satisfaction: http://tinyurl.com/2r8hnt
:-)
I am sure a mind and a spirit like King's understood the horror implicit in any form of discrimination, as well as you obviously do --I just read your excellent piece on the incarcerated African gay couple.
needaseller. com
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Let the bigots prattle on, this is a victory for equal rights.
Conformed victims of molestation finding succor amongst others so traumatized, or inclined, should be legally protected.
DADT is a reasonable path to forestall uniformed and/or ranking "chicken hawks'" hitting on the "uninitiated" on the Company street. "Esprit" is a fact, when it comes to organized killing.
Every soldier or Marine isn't a victim of molestation trying to prove his "manhood" by becoming a nationally "authorized," fully sublimated, professional killer. Nor should "employment" in a "standing army" be a cushy job feeding off the Public's dime. It's bad enough the military didn't arrest Bush and Cheney for committing 9/11, or his father, and Cheney's mentor, Nixon, for assassinating President Kennedy to send us to die in Vietnam.
"Duty, Honor, Country" doesn't have to be usurped (as it is today) by misdirected phonies and deviant lickspittles of bagmen for Rome.
How do we intend that "divine Providence bless our endeavors" when it is transparently obvious that our military has been transformed into mercenary thugs doing evil for fascist plutocrats, traitors, and perverters of all that is good?
Just as the Palast(inian) "problem" in the State of Israel can't be fairly addressed until the institutions and families which committed the Holocaust (the palasts/barons of the Roman "Empire"), now with Maronite Roman Catholic leadership's working to succeed where, its catspaw, Hitler's "Ritual Persecution 3.0," failed, are "properly" addressed: the process by which the same institution molests boys, and girls, to turn them into sublimating psychopaths as soldiers, and prostitutes, promulgating "Babylon," too, must be addressed to shield our military's "innocent" recruits engaged in a legitimate (other than the fact that Rome's "Fifth Column" treasonously sends us to die in false war for its anti-American fascist plutocracy), and patriotic, "rite of passage."
Once Babylon falls, with complete expropriation and extirpation for its "Fifth Column's" treason and depredations against the People and the Constitution, let the caged birds sing. Until then, focus on ridding Our Land of those who molest children and finance and profit from the child molesters' macro historical Organized Crime racket Thomas Jefferson identified as "the real Anti-Christ,""an engine for enslaving mankind."
Let us not be persuaded by "foxes without tails," regardless of their "provenance."
Annuit Coeptis is the first motto of Our Creed. The compass and map of the Path of Righteousness is Truth and Justice.
Righteous men and women shall be at the forefront of those restoring this Promised Land. Good families can come out of Babylon, like all true Americans, and protect their children from molestation.
Death for the molesters.
Death for Babylon.
Death for Treason and may G-d bless America once more.
I hope my writing improves to avoid such misinterpretation in the future. Sorry.
The small government people spend a lot time extending government into people's lives with the one condition being that it is punitive and controlling instead of helpful and enabling.
This issue and the abortion issue, which was a women's private business until the GOP went groping for an issue to hang their hat. And despite them being successful in this groping, accomplished while groping mistresses, rent boys and pages for practice on assumes.
How the public gets lead around by this BS coming from a bunch of hypocrites from both parties is a sign of malaise and indifference of real problems.
You don't do your cause any favors by not understanding the issue.
Gays are sexually attracted to people of their same sex. For you not to see how putting people in extreme close proximity with those they are sexually attracted to could be a potential problem is not only naive but, I suspect, dishonest.
By calling attention to their sexual orientation and making that the focus of the discussion, gay rights advocates are already demonstrating they don't get it.
I don't know if America has a "heterosexual" problem, but it definitely has a "selfishness" problem. And selfishness and military service don't mix.
2) you statement assumes that gay people are unable to control themselves whereas straight people are and that's, of course, nuts.
I think you missed the point of his comment. Since single enlisted personnel have to share rooms, with gays you end up with a situation in which one or more people sharing living quarters are potentially sexually attracted to their roommates. In military bases around the country it is common for single enlisted personnel to share a room, toilet, and shower.
When openly homosexual personnel share rooms with members of the same sex, how exactly is that different from straight personnel sharing rooms with members of the opposite sex?
Having homosexuals in other professions is different because after work they go home to their own homes. For many in the military that doesn't happen; many end up sharing rooms with members of the same sex.
So what is the solution? Homosexuals get their own private rooms? Or they leave the room when the other person is getting dressed or undressed? Do we house homosexuals with members of the opposite sex?
Please note that I'm not saying that homosexuals have "uncontrollable urges" or that they will go around hitting on fellow soldiers. My point is that with openly gay personnel, the straight soldiers will be forced to share living quarters with little privacy with someone who may very well be sexually attracted to him or her.
The issue here is whether a straight soldier has the right not to be housed with someone who by definition may very well be sexually attracted to him or her. Granted, soldiers already have to give up a lot of privacy; that's just the way things are and always will be. But to expect a soldier to be housed with little privacy with someone who is sexually attracted to him really does cross a line, in my opinion.
The fact of the matter is that gay and lesbian service members are already sharing quarters with straight service members. Eliminating DADT makes no physical difference from what is currently going on NOW.
Gay guys aren't suddenly going to start attacking their straight room mate and roving gangs of lesbian service members aren't going to suddenly start accosting straight women in the showers. It's not happening now, so removing the ignorant rule that has the sole purpose of making everybody lie isn't going to physically change any of that.
Just so you know, sweetie, just because I can see a good looking chick and think "Hmmm" doesn't mean I'm going to hit on her. What gay people really think is "Hmmm, too bad they're straight... I need to go find me a queer chick and have a good time". I might look, but they just ain't my brand, so I go elsewhere and find someone who is. Also, and this never ceases to crack me up, us queers get hit on a LOT more by heterosexuals who are interested in "experimenting" that gay people hit on heteros.
BTW, I do find it mildly amusing that you seem to think that you understand gay thinking so well... got something you want to share with us????
As everyone knows, Marines are Pushy Manipulative Bottoms Who Think They're Tops.
Of course yopu are. Do you think we're fucking idiots?
Your response already proves you are not interested in genuine discussion. When you don't take someone at their word but instead believe you are qualified to read into their statements "implied" remarks they haven't made then this only invalidates your own argument.
And here's some news for you: if "heterosexuals" are hitting on you because they are interested in "experimenting," they aren't heterosexuals.
Finally, your most offensive remark is your closing one: "I do find it mildly amusing that you seem to think that you understand gay thinking so well...."
With that you have proved yourself a sexist, which in my mind is comparable to being a racist, because you are saying that because of someone's physical makeup (in this case, sexual orientation) they therefore "think differently."
The military should rightly have no interest in people who "think differently." Their thoughts should be on their service to their country, and not their sexuality.
I don't know if you are an idiot, fucking or otherwise. But you obviously don't understand my point. I could try to explain it again, but I think the first attempt was adequate.
It doesn't.
Two of my best male friends are gay. To them, knowing a man is straight and uninterested removes sex from the equation. This is particularly true in a professional situation.
Everyone's different, of course, and that doesn't preclude the possibility of a gay soldier hitting on his/her straight comrades... but I can't imagine that the majority of gay soldiers are just waiting for the right moment to pounce upon their fellows. These men and women are professional soldiers, members of a highly-trained military - and I think a straight soldier can handle knowing their bunkmate might think they're cute.
Ok, but your personal self control really isn't the issue. The issue is, as a matter of policy, should people be housed together sharing room, toilet, and shower facilities, when at least one of them can reasonably be expected to be sexually attracted to the other?
Even in light of your admirable self control, if a woman were housed with you, would you consider her unreasonable if she were uncomfortable with that arrangement?
Calling it "insanity" or even a "problem" seems very extreme to me. Look, for most people there are only two issues involved: same-sex marriage and military service. Beyond that, most people are fully supportive of gays and lesbians having all other rights -- employment, housing, education, privacy, voting, holding public office, civil unions, etc.
Marriage and military service are different. Marriage is fundamentally about channeling heterosexual sex and procreation into a defined institution for the sake of the welfare of children. (If heterosexual sex didn't end up in children there would be no need for anything like "marriage." There would be no purpose to it.) Marriage is a different issue so I won't argue about it in this post. My point is only that there are reasons why marriage is very different from employment, housing, and other rights.
Military service is also different, but mainly because of the unique situations of housing and the effect of sexual attraction on unit performance and cohesion.
So I fail to see how concerns about those two issues out of all other possible issues somehow constitutes "insanity."
-well overdue gone
-is a bigot's resort no matter how it was, in '93, a compromise
-and that straight people who harbor the idea that gays are more libidinous and uncontrolled that we are, are just silly, at best