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Could flawed Iraq war open the military to gays?

Posted January 14th, 2007 by GustavoMustafa

Historically, during times of overseas conflict in the United States, civil rights for various oppressed social groups were presented with windows of opportunities.


In World War II, women were suddenly thrusted into the workplace and the public sphere, that generation spawned what would later be known as feminism (equality between the sexes) and cheerleading, once a male sport, would become synonymous with women.


During Korea and Vietnam, African Americans would rally this nation to live up to the ideas of freedom and equality for all by challenging "Jim Crow" legislation and white supremacy, their struggle would inspire other non-white communities like Mexican Americans (Chicano Movement) and Native Americans (American Indian Movement).


The current neo-conservative led war in Iraq based on lies and the disposal and removal of a former ally who assisted the United States in a proxy war against Iran, a nation that during the Pahlavi monarchy once shared the special relationship that the House of Saud now enjoys with America, brings back to the national forefront the issue of homosexuality and serving openly in the US military.


All major Western military powers including Israel allow openly gay and lesbian servicemembers to serve.


The call for equality is coming from the commissioned officer ranks, in fact, "homosexual admission" is no longer permissable for mandatory separation from the military. I was honorably discharged on March 1, 2006 (my 26th birthday) because I wrote a letter to my superior stating my sexual orientation. I was scheduled to go to Japan on an all male command, having just completed my first deployment in the "Northern Arabian Gulf" (Persian Gulf) a few months earlier. I faced homophobia first hand, I made the mistake of going enlisted in the military, that means less pay and disrespect from "salty dogs" (veteran Sailors) who see you as a "wet behind the ears college boy."


I hated my occupational rate, I hated the restrictions of military life, it reminded me of an "Islamic theocracy" to some degree, loyalty to the mission at hand was to be unquestioned, I had to be careful what I said in the galley concerning our foreign policy, my opinions alarmed some military officers, etc.


I was a good Sailor, but alas, I did not feel that I was "accelerating my life" (contrary to the commercial advertisements on MTV), so I made the decision to leave the military. We are fighting to promote democracy and freedom in the heart of the Muslim world, however, I used legalized discrimination in the United States to get out of the military by playing the "gay card." In retrospect, I should have never been discharged, but my decision was seen as bold and brave by other gay servicemembers in my command. In fact, my calculated move inspired others to come out in my command for reasons slightly different from mines.


It took two months for my administrative separation since we were in our "training cycle" which meant going underway for short periods of time off the coast of San Diego County between Camp Pendleton, San Nicolas Island, and Silver Strand (a sliver land just south of Coronado).


I still keep in touch with some friends from my old command in Japan.


But reading a recent article from Military Magazine, 7/10 of military personnel would have no problem with openly gay and lesbian servicemembers.


In fact, the lack of recruits to the military may open up military service to openly gay and lesbian servicemembers.


Here is what some current and retired officers about the issue.


In an op-ed published in the New York Times, John M. Shalikashvili, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Congress should give "serious reconsideration" to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the ban on openly lesbian, gay and bisexual military personnel. Shalikashvili, who supported the ban on open service in 1993, writes that "I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces," and goes on to say that "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."


"'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is out of step with both the American public and those within our armed forces," said C. Dixon Osburn, executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN). "The counsel of military leaders increasingly supports repeal of the law. Congress must, as General Shalikashvili urges, consider the overwhelming evidence of the past fourteen years. If they do, the clear answer is that we must lift the ban."


Shalikashvili, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs from 1993 to 1997, joins other senior retired military officers who have called for repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." In May 2006, Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy, USA (Ret.), the first female three-star officer in Army history, called the law "a hollow policy that serves no useful purpose." Lieutenant General Daniel W. Christman, former superintendent of West Point, recently told The New York Times that "It is clear that national attitudes toward this issue have evolved considerably in the last decade. This has been led by a new generation of service members who take a more relaxed and tolerant view toward homosexuality." Retired Admiral John Hutson, who currently serves as Dean of Franklin Pierce Law School, also recently wrote that "It would be a great tragedy if we didn't take advantage of (the) chance to correct a flawed policy."


In 2003, two retired generals and an admiral 'came out' in the New York Times, and in November 2006 fourteen senior retired military officers urged the First Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the ban. They wrote that the law "undermines the military's ability to fulfill its primary mission of providing national security by discouraging the enlistment of gay persons qualified to serve their country and by expelling from the military those who have served with honor."


In today's op-ed, General Shalikashvili writes that "Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers."


A December 18th Zogby poll also found that 73% of military personnel polled were comfortable with lesbians and gays.


"General Shalikashvili's statement is the first by a Joint Chiefs Chairman to call for repeal, and as such is enormously significant," said Osburn. "The Pentagon has dismissed more than 11,000 men and women under this law. It is clear that enforcement of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is arbitrary. We continue to lose critical personnel who happen to be gay. As General Shalikashvili points out, continuing to keep this law on the books is detrimental to our national security."


 


 


 

Comments

God willing, this will

On January 14th, 2007 Laury Silvers says:

God willing, this will normalize the situation for gays in the military.  I posted the story  to another site.  One might expect very conservative responses, yet those who have replied wonder why this is even still an issue in this day and age.


Your humility is heartbreaking.  You left the military by using their systematic exclusion of open homosexuals against them but insist it was not an act of courage in comparaison to your peers who came out but fought to stay in.    


TabarakAllah alayk.


 


______________________________


Deja Fu is the feeling that you have been kicked in the head this way before. —Terry Pratchett

I got permission to repost

On January 14th, 2007 Laury Silvers says:

I got permission to repost the following comment. It is from “Travlr” from the forum I posted Gustavo’s story on. Right on the mark:


They said it about blacks in unsegregated units. They were wrong.


They said it about women in combat roles. They are being proven wrong there.


They said it about gays in the military period. And as the rest of the world is showing them, the US military is wrong there, too.


I can think of a few US sub drivers and crews who will likely be pissed off because the gay COs, XOs and crew of the Canadian, Danish and Dutch ASW forces in STANFORLANT that sank them in so many of the wargames.


One of the most deadly fighting units in history — the Sacred Band — was comprised of almost 100% totaly homosexual men. It took outrageous odds to finally defeat them.


If the servicemen can’t get around the fact that one of their fellows may be gay, it’s that serviceman’s problem, not the gay soldier’s. And since it’s the guy with the problem that creates the lack of trust within the unit, he’s the one to be punted somewhere that he can’t do much damage (a desk in Anchorage or Guam sounds promising).


True story, from just a few years ago (about 6). A bunch of new recruits, fresh out of their trades training showed up at HMCS VANCOUVER, and were being given their oreintation lecture by the Coxswain (senior NCO aboard) and the XO. They asked, point blank, if anyone there had a problem serving with homosexuals, and there were a few looks being passed between the dozen OD’s (Ordinary Seaman; equiv. to an E-2) and a snigger or two.


The ‘Swain then proceded to tell them that their CO was gay. So was their XO. And so was the Coxswain. SO if there were any problem, they’d really like to know about them right thne, so tehy could get the paperwork started for their transfers to another unit. Their problems with gays in unifrom was not going to affect the performance of the Ship’s Company.


The ‘Swain, as it turns out, was a very senior CPO1 (Equiv. E-9), and one of the most respected sailors in the Fleet, because nobody — but NOBODY, of any rank — tried screwing over someone under his authority and responsibility. He said “jump”, and you flew!


Obviously, it can be done. But only if people put away their prejudices and disregard the hate-mongering promoted by the Religious (Fundie) Right and their adherents. The God they preach, is by no means a “Loving God”.

hmm.. any comment?   Les

On January 15th, 2007 kukuman says:

hmm.. any comment?


 


Les is not more…. Les is gay! 

Casual sex is a con: women

On January 15th, 2007 kukuman says:

Casual sex is a con: women just aren't like men Dawn Eden– Sunday Times


January 14, 2007


 The Sixties generation thought everything should be free. But only a few decades later the hippies were selling water at rock festivals for $5 a bottle. But for me the price of “free love” was even higher. I sacrificed


what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had — and I had more than my fair share — far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect.


And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead.


I am 37, and like millions of other girls, was born into a world which encouraged young women to explore their sexuality. It was almost presented to us as a feminist act. In the 1960s the future Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown famously asked: Can a woman have sex like a man? Yes, she answered because “like a man, [a woman] is a sexual creature”. Her insight launched a million “100 new sex tricks” features in women’s magazines. And then that sex-loving feminist icon Germaine Greer enthused that “groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren’t possessive about their conquests”.


As a historian of pop music and daughter of the sexual revolution I embraced Greer’s call to (men’s) arms. My job was to write the sleeve notes to 1960s pop CDs and I gained a reputation for having an encyclopedic knowledge base, interviewing the original artists and recording personnel. It was all a joy for me, as I was obsessed with the sounds of the era. I would have paid just to meet artists such as Petula Clark, Del Shannon, Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson, Alan Price, and the Hollies — and instead I was getting paid to tell their stories. I became the top woman in my (overwhelmingly male) profession. The opportunities for shenanigans were endless.


Rock journalism had an extra bonus for me because I was deeply attracted to musicians — all kinds, though drummers, unused to being appreciated for their minds, were easy marks. While I was unaware of Greer’s injunction to make love freely, I read the supergroupie memoir, I’m With the Band by Pamela Des Barres, envying her ability to drink in everything that was desirable about rockers — their good looks, wit, creativity and fame — without seeming to lose any part of herself in her (extraordinarily numerous) dalliances with them.


I tried to emulate her and I suppose to a large extent succeeded. In some ways, the touring rock musician was my ideal sexual partner. By bedding them I could enjoy a temporary sort of fairy-tale bond; knowing it was bound to be fleeting as we would both move on meant that I never had to confront my own vulnerability about properly making a connection with someone. I could establish a transient intimacy and never have to deal with the real thing — and the real rejection that might entail.


Of course the rejection would come as the latest lover moved on to the next town and the next woman — but somehow, being able to see it coming made me feel more in control. I was choosing, I thought, the lesser pain.


But in all that casual sex, there was one moment I learnt to dread more than any other. I dreaded it not out of fear that the sex would be bad, but out of fear that it would be good. If the sex was good, then, even if I knew in my heart that the relationship wouldn’t work, I would still feel as though the act had bonded me with my sex partner in a deeper way than we had been bonded before. It’s in the nature of sex to awaken deep emotions within us, emotions that are unwelcome when one is trying to keep it light.


On such nights the worst moment was when it was all over. Suddenly I was jarred back to earth. Then I’d lie back and feel bereft. He would still be there, and if I was really lucky, he’d lie down next to me. Yet, I couldn’t help feeling like the spell had been broken. We could nuzzle or giggle or we could fall asleep in each other’s arms but I knew it was play acting and so did he. We weren’t really intimate — it had just been a game. The circus had left town.


 Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.


It took me a long time to realise this. My earliest attitudes about sex were shaped from what I saw in the lives of my older sister and my mother — especially my mother, a free spirit who was desperately trying to make up missing out on the hippie era.


My parents split up when I was five; a few years later Dad moved across the country, so I was raised by my mother. While my schoolmates’ mothers were teaching them how to bake cookies, mine was letting her goateed boyfriend teach me, aged eight, the complex mechanics behind his water bong for smoking pot. (He thoughtfully stopped short of letting me take a drag on the weed.) My father held traditional values, but he didn’t want to seem prudish and was clearly uncomfortable setting down rules for a daughter he rarely saw. He almost never talked to me about sex. It was simply understood that I would have sex when I was ready — whether married or not.


I learnt from my sister and my mother that a woman can be intelligent and beautiful and yet have a difficult time meeting a responsible, gentlemanly man who wishes to be married for life. This was the 1970s and early 1980s, the age of the Sensitive New Age Guy or aptly named “snag”. My mother attracted them because she was new age herself, doing kundalini yoga and attending lectures by various gurus. The snags treated her with what passed for respect in that world but they never gave much of themselves and didn’t appreciate Mom in the way I did — I wondered if there were any men capable of valuing inner beauty. In both her search for a husband and her quest for a fulfilling spirituality, Mom was, in my eyes, fuelled by a longing to fill the empty space.


As I hit my teens, I felt the vacuum too and longed for male companionship. But I was determined not to get hurt the way I had seen my mother hurt. Having premarital sex seemed like a surefire way to get burnt. So I decided early on that I would not have sex until . . . marriage? That would be great. However, I didn’t think I could wait until then. Instead, I resolved that I would wait to have sex until I was really “in love” — whatever that meant.


That all may sound simple enough but, growing up, I had little concept of the meaning of sex and marriage. I thought sex was something one did for recreation and also if one wanted to have a baby. (Well, I was on the right track with that last one.) Marriage, I believed, meant that one had a societal sanction to have sex with a particular person. Sex was better when one was in love, I imagined. Married people should have sex only with each other because — well, because it wasn’t nice to cheat, plus cheating could lead to divorce, which I knew meant lots of pain.


As a teenager with no moral foundation for my resolution to save my virginity for Mr Right — other than a fear of being hurt by Mr Wrong — I felt free to push the envelope. No, more than free. I became one of those mythical virgins who does “everything but”. The name Lewinsky was not yet a verb, but if it were, I imagine men would often have whispered it to one another behind my back.


When, at age 23, I finally got tired of waiting and “officially” lost my virginity to a man I didn’t love, it was a big deal to me at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t really so significant. True, my dalliances became less complicated. When I did “everything but”, I used to dread having to explain why I didn’t want to go all the way; once I started having sex, that was no longer necessary.


But in a wider sense, losing my virginity, far from being the demarcation between past and future, was just a blip on the continuum of my sexual degradation. The decline had begun when I first sought sexual pleasure for its own sake.


Our culture — both in the media via programmes such as Sex and the City and in everyday interactions — relentlessly puts forth the idea that lust is a way station on the road to love. It isn’t. It left me with a brittle facade incapable of real intimacy. Occasionally a man would tell me I appeared hard, which surprised me as I thought I was so vulnerable. In truth, underneath my attempts to appear bubbly, I was hard — it was the only way I could cope with what I was doing to my self and my body.


The misguided, hedonistic philosophy which urges young women into this kind of behaviour harms both men and women; but it is particularly damaging to women, as it pressures them to subvert their deepest emotional desires. The champions of the sexual revolution are cynical.They know in their tin hearts that casual sex doesn’t make women happy. T


That’s why they feel the need continually to promote it. These days I live a very different kind of life. I still touch base with old musician pals now and again, but I’m more likely to hang out with members of church choirs. I am chaste. My decision to resist casual sex was, once again, influenced by my mother — though not in the way she initially hoped.


Although she was Jewish, she gave up her new age beliefs for Christianity when I was a teenager. I myself had no such plans at the time. For one thing, I didn’t have faith. I had grown up up in a liberal, Reform Jewish household; but, after being a bat mitzvah at 13, I fell into agnosticism and it seemed like nothing could pull me out.


As far as I could see, Christians were a dull, faceless mass who ruled the world. My mission in life, as I saw it, was to be different; creative, liberal, rebellious. Then one day in December 1995, I was doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach, leader of a Los Angeles rock band called the Sugarplastic, and asked him what he was reading. His answer was The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton. I picked it up out of curiosity and was captivated. Soon I was picking up everything by Chesterton that I could get my hands on, starting with his book Orthodoxy, his attempt to explain why he believed in the Christian faith.


That was the first time it struck me that there was something exciting about Christianity. I kept reading Chesterton even as I continued my dissipated lifestyle, and then one night in October 1999 I had a hypnagogic experience — the sort in which you’re not sure if you are asleep or awake. I heard a woman’s voice saying: “Some things are not meant to be known. Some things are meant to be understood.” I got on my knees and prayed — and eventually entered the Catholic church.


One night last year I had dinner with a male friend, a charming English journalist I would have dated if he shared my faith (he didn’t) and if he were interested in getting married (ditto). He peppered me with questions about chastity, even going so far as to suggest that maybe, given that I’d been looking for so long, I might not find the man I was looking for. “That’s not true,” I responded. “My chances are better now than they’ve ever been, because before I was chaste, I was looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s only now that I’m truly ready for marriage and have a clear vision of the kind of man I want. “I may be 37,” I concluded, “but in husband-seeking years, I’m only 22.”

heh... Gay is also a

On January 15th, 2007 kukuman says:

heh… Gay is also a scam!!!


 people never gets it… 


 Feminisme has its root from communist!


 and communist has its root from Babylon Judaism and Satanism!


what a scam!!..... and shhh Islam is bad ,evil and terrorist! 

Gee I thought Islam was part

On January 15th, 2007 Ginan Rauf says:

Gee I thought Islam was part of the Abrahamic
traditions. Doesn’t the good book mention all
those Prophets- you know Moses- and Jesus?
The guy whose mom had a sura named after her?
Hmm isn’t the guy Jewish? why all the hate?


Incidentally, feminism is not one. there are
feminist you know who question the sexual
revolution and debate the harmful effects of
pornography.

Abrahamic faith? What are

On January 16th, 2007 kukuman says:

Abrahamic faith?
What are you talking about??
True Abrahamic faith has long disappear in both the Christian and Jews teaching!
That is the reason why God sent Muhammad as the seal of the Prophet.. but of course if you don’t wanna believe that (if you are not a Muslim)or maybe you don wanna believe in it instead you wanna believe in a new ‘women’ prophet or whatever…


Anyway, we can only hate what God hate! but some people..maybe Ginan? just Love the devil and can’t hate that too? Maybe you need to Love the Iblis too cause its not his fault its evil?


Feminist who question the sexual revolution?
well didn’t you just read the article by Dawn Eden, just above you? And she is Jewish and Christian by the way!


but history never lie….
Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were all Jews!
Now how many people died from that Genocide(Bolshevik revolution)??? Way more than the allege 6 million!


Not only were they just Jews(a race) but they were the devoted Babylonic Talmudist with their Messianic ‘Rabbi’nical Judaism! Now don’t tell all those self-worship and Mystical Kabbala are not Satanic? There are not even Abrahimic one bit!


But of course why listen to Moses or Abraham or even Muhammad…
Just listen to your Rabbi or women Imam!

Don't feed the trolls,

On January 16th, 2007 Omar Gatto says:

Don’t feed the trolls, lol!


- A Salafi in worship, a Sufi in society, a Secularist in government.

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