a bill to repeal don't ask don't tell and to allow gays to serve openly in the US armed forces as failed today 56 to 43. hopefully efforts will continue to get this horrid policy repealed . http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gays_military
What exactly is horrid about it? A whole bunch of people have just lost the chance to die in an unnecessary war? Not that I agree with the policy, mind you.. These people here do, though. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Personally, I think that the way the gays are handled should depend upon the results of an official study by the Pentagon. I don't like military people very much because they are loud, but I do tend to trust them when they say they have set out to do something correctly. Allow people with military experience to fight and win our battles and figure out the best way of doing it, but they should be held suspect if they obviously have an ulterior motive, such as religious zealotry. Otherwise, I expect that a military person would do something he disagreed with if he found that it was important for winning a battle. What annoys me is how politics and fucking religion have complicated the matter. If it were not for these factors, I would not need to comment very much on this at all. As it is, I no longer believe that religiosity stems from ignorance or gullibility. I think it is a result of defective moral character, and I consider it a vice. Politicians are annoying jerks I depend on to defend me from annoying lunatics, and I speak well of them when I think they're listening.
That sucks so much ass I cannot put it into words. Do they honestly think that because someone is gay, he's going to try and rape one of his comrades?
I have not been able to completely unravel the thinking behind "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and homosexuality amongst military personnel.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1916961 Sad. The repeal is a little past due. In wierd news: while looking for the above clip, I found this one. ....WTF? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This is crazy of an entirely new class.
Well, it is in the middle of election season, so politicians who would normally be level-headed are behaving like the thinking parts of their brains have been put on cruise control while the driver has gone in back to get a beer from the mini-fridge, if you know what I mean. I'm sure they'll pass the repeal in the lame-duck session, perhaps even overwhelmingly so.
I have mixed feeling on the policy itself, but the headline of this thread should read "Democrats attempt to create political wedge fails." Obama could pull a Truman and sign an executive order ending this tomorrow. How much you want to bet he won't?
Executive orders don't work that way, and Obama was never a "gay president." Believe it or not, but Barack Obama has in practice been a solid centrist, even center-right in some ways. Even his health reform ideas have been right of HR Clinton, and the only controversial part of it is a simple reform in insurance law. Remember, the concept of "nation-building" used to be a feel-good, make-the-world-happy liberal idea. The GOP used to think it was daft, but now they see that, "while the cat's away, the mice will play," suddenly they have come to their senses. And now the Democrats are all "keep the troops home, focus on our own security, blah-blah-blah." In fact, this is almost as big of a change as during Taft, when the conservatives started getting friendly with the GOP. It made T Roosevelt furious. For Taft, it was pacifism; for the conservatives, it was xenophobia. Different motives, coincidence of ends. But it wasn't until Jesse Helms came on the scene that Southern conservatives all went over to the Republican ticket. It's kind of sad, actually: Helms was a good politician supposedly, but there was so much he was wrong about...sad waste of talent. But it was also Helms who helped kill the "Yaller-dog Democrats." Now watch the Log Cabin prats make a lot of confusion over the gay issue. It was hard enough being a queer, and suddenly I'm going to have to start figuring out which god damn Republicans are pro-gay and which still haven't seen the light. The world is out to make us go mad, I tell you. The philosophies of any party will tend to change year-by-year. You see mass migrations...you get confused pretty quickly if you aren't ready to think on your feet. Of course, there are some people out there who think that the Democrats all running around smoking dope, saying "property is theft" and talking about new ways to raise taxes, and the same jackasses seem to think the Republicans are all racist and homophobic as hell but are all fiscally responsible and strait-laced. That's the impression you get based on how people talk, but it's more complicated than that. There's a lot of historical detail...if you don't know it, you're lost in the woods. In fact, the only issue the parties haven't shifted much on in the past twenty years has been abortion, and a lot of Dems are against "partial-birth." Even that's getting confused. Anyway, DADT is on its death-bed. Now the court has struck it down, Congress doesn't have any choice. Unless the Pentagon study actually turns up some valid concern over the issue, even a Republican-dominated Congress would eventually have to cave and have the damn law repealed, especially with public opinion the way it is.
I think the point is that it is no ones business if a male (for example) is attracted to men or women. Look at it this way: If a single male goes to work in an office is it mandatory that he state his sexual preference? The military also deals with people who are younger and less mature.
If I understand correctly, an executive order cannot override an act of Congress. Also, it is the domain of Congress to actually raise an army or other form of military. The President is its Commander in Chief. There is a difference. http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc-cgi/get_external.cgi?type=pubL&target=103-160 Here's the .pdf file... http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=103_cong_bills&docid=f:h2401eas.txt.pdf Locate Section 546 Sir, you seem to be new to our country. Let it be understood that our system of government is equipped with checks and balances that are there to assure a balance of authority between the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. This is a time-honored tradition in our country, and it is indicated both implicitly and explicitly in most of our laws. It is understood that the executive branch of government does not have the responsibility, under most circumstances, of making laws. Under certain conditions, an executive order can serve as law, but it does not override laws that are made by an equivalent legislative assembly. Furthermore, although I am a gay man, two things are ranked more highly in my mind than being treated fairly by the law: 1) for our politicians to behave in accordance with the law, and 2) for our military endeavors to be successful. I am highly confident that no credible reason will be found for excluding a person known to be gay from our military. However, my primary motivation for believing that DADT should be repealed is simply that the original law was based more on prejudice than any professionally conducted study of human behavior. What I find most appalling in a politician is for one to disregard the dignity of his or her profession according to any motive whatsoever. I consider it to be rank, vulgar and toxic. It is the domain of barbarians and savages to manufacture laws that are based on private motives. Such is equally deplorable to be found in a member of our military: an officer who cannot be trusted to respect the dignity of his or her profession should not be trusted in any command whatsoever, no matter his or her motive.
This does not make a person any more or less gay, they are gay and will remain that way until they either want to change or they die. Laws cannot enact anti bigotry but there's always going to bigotry wherever you go. No one forces anyone to enter into the military do they. Then if you already know what the law is concerning DADT then you must decide to abide by that law or just not enlist. That is a choice that everyone has and should be also discussed when bringing this DADT subjet up.
I'm simply stating that he has the means to end it. If Obama, or any other Democratic president, REALLY cared about gays in the military, they would issue an Executive Order and end the years of circular debate.
Did you read the entire bill? It contains a butt-load of other nonsense. Had the Dems just made the law about one subject matter--DADT--it, more than likely, would have passed. But they didn't. It had other nonsense tucked in it that should have been left out. As always, politics is at play here. The Democrats are using Gays as a way of saying, "Ah-HA! The Republicans are evil!" but fail to mention all the other distasteful nonsense included in the bill. Moreover, the president could simply sign an executive order, forcing the armed forces to end the practice. It may be "law", but the president is still commander in chief. There would be a lawsuit. He might even lose, but there's an off chance that he might actually win. Either case, he'd be taking a bold step to keep his promise. Right now he's doing what he's been doing for two years: Pussy-footing around larger issues he promised to address before he became president. What's the worst that can happen? It gets upheald? ~String
Seems something of a hybrid to me: Congress overrode Clinton by including text in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994 (passed in 1993) requiring the military to abide by regulations essentially identical to the 1982 absolute ban policy.[13] The Clinton Administration on December 21, 1993[15] issued Defense Directive 1304.26, which directed that military applicants were not to be asked about their sexual orientation.[13] This is the policy now known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_ask_don't_tell Oh, please... Do you know your history? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981
CT, I beg your pardon if I have miscomprehended your point here, but I suspect that you have misinterpreted what the discussion is about. We are talking about having the law repealed, and there is a legal process for this. Furthermore, it actually is the domain of Robert Gates as the Secretary of Defense to set rules on who does and who doesn't have the authority to enforce DADT. Furthermore, Log Cabin Republicans v. United States of America is a perfectly valid judicial challenge to the law. Personally, I would rather give the Pentagon time to complete its study, but I am fearful that a Republican-dominated Congress would throw out the repeal no matter what the results of the study were. You know as well as I do that the GOP is abysmally partisan to the point of straining legality, not to mention any credible standard for professional conduct. If the repeal were passed, at least it would be politically possible to renegotiate the issue later based on the results of the study.
...and it's even tougher when everyone's got a gun and there's things called "friendly fire" and "man overboard". As with the homosexuality thing in general, people don't seem so concerned about lesbians, but about young men with raging hormones in extremely stressful/isolated situations. I've lived with gays, I've shared sleeping quarters with them, but I haven't hotbunked with them, and none of it bothered me (and I'm 100% straight). I've seen formerly straight guys flip. Did they make a mistake or were they always gay? According to a recently popular homosexual view, very few people are totally straight or totally gay ... sexual orientation isn't directly correlated with sexual behavior ... and, so, you can be straight and act gay, or be gay and act straight, and it doesn't change your orientation. Perhaps until the homosexuals clearly define what homosexuality means, Congress will continue to stay with the status quo.
To an extent, but Clinton would not have had the authority to repeal the law by executive order. He had the authority to establish certain rules as to how it would be enforced, but repealing a law is not within the scope of the executive branch of government. In fact, Robert Gates has already done something similar by establishing new rules in which only flag officer's have the responsibility of enforcing this particular rule. In fact, I have a highly detailed knowledge of it, but you seem to wear your ignorance on your sleeve as if you were proud of it. You are not even paying any attention to what my views on this are. I am a moderate on this, and this is in spite of having an obvious vested interest in a particular outcome. The military personnel that I am familiar with have a mutual, fairly respectful agreement that we grate on each other tremendously, but there are very few people outside of the military I would trust to do something they disagreed with for the sake of improving their odds of victory in battle. I am confident that, if the Pentagon were to establish unequivocally that DADT and the law respecting it is harmful or completely useless, even the most homophobic Marine alive would be happy to conduct himself according to that finding. However, the odds of any politician from the GOP behaving with any sense of professionalism or impartiality are lower than the odds of me waking up tomorrow morning feeling horny for woman-flesh. Vagina is creepy. It bleeds, and it stinks and makes weird noises. If I wanted to conceive children, which I do not have a sufficient income to support and therefore don't, I could hold my nose and do whatever is necessary to carry on the family name, which I just might do one day, but I can assure you that I am saying quite a lot by saying that my distrust for the GOP greatly transcends the strength of my sexual orientation.
