Yet another nation, one that I wasn’t aware of, that seems to have done right nice since they let the gays serve openly:
The world has grown up in the past couple of decades. Many civilians and soldiers alike now realize and accept that what adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms is unrelated to their individual moral character. America is a little late to this realization; at least 25 other countries already allow gays to serve openly in their militaries, including the state of Israel.
Taiwan has a conflicted attitude towards homosexuality. Gay people are not necessarily welcomed in society, and many local homosexuals report hiding their sexuality from their relatives. But there is also almost no organized opposition to “the gay lifestyle” in Taiwan as there is in many nations. The Republic of China (R.O.C.) Armed Forces have also been somewhat ahead of the curve. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry discontinued treating homosexuality as a psychiatric illness in 1994. In 2002, Taiwan’s military announced that it was ending the only official ban on gays in the R.O.C. military; a policy disallowing homosexual military guards from guarding sensitive military installations or high-level officials.
Speaking on the subject of the 2002 end to the ban on gays serving as military police, Lt. Col. Louis Liu, who served as Assistant Naval Attache in the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Washington was quoted by the California-based think tank Palm Center as saying that the changes were, “a good thing for a democratic society like ours. I don’t think this is really a big deal. It just means Taiwanese society is more open and there are different choices now. If you’re gay and you can do the job, that’s fine.”
Eight years ago! If the fever dreams of Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins had any bearing on reality, Taiwan would have fallen into the sea by now! And if those hate-spewing numbnuts actually respected our actual military as much as they worship a fetishized imaginary version of our military, they’d understand that it’s more than mildly offensive to suggest that smaller, less powerful nations can handle gays openly serving, yet somehow poor widdle American troops can’t handle it.
