Thursday, January 29, 2004
Gays in the Military: IraqNow Readers Weigh In
Reaction to the Gays in the Military piece ran the gamut, but I'm pleased to say, was uniformly cordial.
Here are some excerpts:
Can we be confident that the enlisted man will give his loyalty to the unit and not to his lover in a combat situation?
Isn’t this the sort of thing that we avoid by keeping the military heterosexual?
--Aaron G.
Isn't the don't ask don't tell policy far more dangerous? Wouldn't that make a person very vulnerable to blackmail? The annoying town queer that everyone can identify immediately as gay, would never make it to the army anyway.
What really annoys me is, that this is an issue at all. Not just in the army, but also in families, companies, education.....just about everywhere except in the arts.
Name withheld
When I was in during the first gulf war I saw news articles reporting that people were claiming to be gay so they would not have to be deployed. I feel if gays were allowed to protect the constitution like everyone else, events like that would not happen. If someone claimed to be gay...."great, now get on the bus!"
--Name withheld
. Predatory homosexuals in the military have compiled a body of guilt so profound as to make concern about their inclusion a rational behavior...
Predatory homosexuals have repeatedly broken the faith and violated the trust reposed in them by their country and their service. Legislation will not change this. The heroism of decent homosexuals might have some influence in the future. The repudiation of predatory homosexuals by the gay community will do a lot more to build trust in thier lifestyle choice than any medal or Act of Congress.
Patrick S. Lasswell. (He emailed this to me, but you can read the whole thing as an open letter to IraqNow on his weblog. )
We had a soldier badly burned an in Landstuhl, and two soldiers, a very young and younger looking private an a sergeant E5, who drove the commander back and forth to visit the injured soldier. One evening, the private woke up to see the sergeant trying to perform fellatio on him. The private screamed, all hell broke loose, and the sergeant was disciplined.
I wanted the sergeant court-martialed for sexual battery, attempted rape, whatever the lawyers could come up with. Instead, the sergeant was busted to private and chaptered out as a homosexual. The sergeant gave a tearful apology to the unit later, and said he had problems since he had been molested as an 8-year-old boy.
This ex-sergeant had serious problems. But he was not "gay." Most officers considered him a homosexual, saw that he tried to perform sex acts on a sleeping soldier, and concluded, "homosexuals are threats to good order and discipline because they will try to perform sex acts on other soldiers." I just do not believe that is true of most well-adjusted homosexuals. This ex-sergeant seems to me a pedophile, but he is not a normal gay man. (He was actually married to a beautiful, nice German woman and had two kids.) I was upset at the discipline because he was treated diferently because the crime scared them. Had a soldier assaulted a sleeping female soldier, there would be rape charges, but this guy was merely chaptered out. And a new group off soldiers learned, I think wrongly, that gay men are predators.
--Name withheld.
Thank you so very much for all your emails. I regret I can't answer all of them. But I do read them.
Splash, out
Jason
Here are some excerpts:
Can we be confident that the enlisted man will give his loyalty to the unit and not to his lover in a combat situation?
Isn’t this the sort of thing that we avoid by keeping the military heterosexual?
--Aaron G.
Isn't the don't ask don't tell policy far more dangerous? Wouldn't that make a person very vulnerable to blackmail? The annoying town queer that everyone can identify immediately as gay, would never make it to the army anyway.
What really annoys me is, that this is an issue at all. Not just in the army, but also in families, companies, education.....just about everywhere except in the arts.
Name withheld
When I was in during the first gulf war I saw news articles reporting that people were claiming to be gay so they would not have to be deployed. I feel if gays were allowed to protect the constitution like everyone else, events like that would not happen. If someone claimed to be gay...."great, now get on the bus!"
--Name withheld
. Predatory homosexuals in the military have compiled a body of guilt so profound as to make concern about their inclusion a rational behavior...
Predatory homosexuals have repeatedly broken the faith and violated the trust reposed in them by their country and their service. Legislation will not change this. The heroism of decent homosexuals might have some influence in the future. The repudiation of predatory homosexuals by the gay community will do a lot more to build trust in thier lifestyle choice than any medal or Act of Congress.
Patrick S. Lasswell. (He emailed this to me, but you can read the whole thing as an open letter to IraqNow on his weblog. )
We had a soldier badly burned an in Landstuhl, and two soldiers, a very young and younger looking private an a sergeant E5, who drove the commander back and forth to visit the injured soldier. One evening, the private woke up to see the sergeant trying to perform fellatio on him. The private screamed, all hell broke loose, and the sergeant was disciplined.
I wanted the sergeant court-martialed for sexual battery, attempted rape, whatever the lawyers could come up with. Instead, the sergeant was busted to private and chaptered out as a homosexual. The sergeant gave a tearful apology to the unit later, and said he had problems since he had been molested as an 8-year-old boy.
This ex-sergeant had serious problems. But he was not "gay." Most officers considered him a homosexual, saw that he tried to perform sex acts on a sleeping soldier, and concluded, "homosexuals are threats to good order and discipline because they will try to perform sex acts on other soldiers." I just do not believe that is true of most well-adjusted homosexuals. This ex-sergeant seems to me a pedophile, but he is not a normal gay man. (He was actually married to a beautiful, nice German woman and had two kids.) I was upset at the discipline because he was treated diferently because the crime scared them. Had a soldier assaulted a sleeping female soldier, there would be rape charges, but this guy was merely chaptered out. And a new group off soldiers learned, I think wrongly, that gay men are predators.
--Name withheld.
Thank you so very much for all your emails. I regret I can't answer all of them. But I do read them.
Splash, out
Jason
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