It’s the Rude Pundit, so shield your eyes if you’re feeling prudish, but as is so often the case, he cuts right to the heart of the issue. I’ll replace certain vowels with asterisks [looks like this, Brian Brown: *] so that you can’t tell which naughty words he’s using:
Essentially, the findings of the Pentagon working group on the effects of repealing the always-idiotic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military is pretty much one big goddamn shrug. Sure, sure, let’s be honest here: there’s a large number of soldiers who don’t want to have anything to do with the gays, roughly 25-30% per question. And, to go even further, if you figure in the number of people who answered questions about unit cohesion and more with “Equally Positively and Negatively,” well, there’s a good chunk of soldiers who feel there will be some bad effects of dropping the policy.
But, and the point can’t be made enough, who the f*ck cares? All you’re seeing is the number of ignorant people who fear the unknown or have lived with enforced homophobia. As the report notes, in 1949, 61% of white soldiers opposed integration of the armed services. You can bet that there’s still about 10% or more of white soldiers who think the Marines oughta be lily-ass white, probably even more who think that women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in combat. Again, who cares? You know what changed the minds of most whites in the military and in society? Just f*cking doing it. People realized that blacks weren’t going to rape the WACs and could shoot a f*cking gun and bleed as much as a white soldier. It took a couple of decades, and included rank, awful racism, and even riots by soldiers, but that’s the growing pains of a society that thinks it should advance rights, not diminish them.
Amen. Read it all.
