DADT and the fallacies that surround it

Bottom line up front, I know that there will likely be some growing pains and serious incidents involving the repeal of DADT and the ability for gays to serve openly in our military. But unless the faith in this nation is waning, and we're not really that exceptional after all....we can look to other western, industrialized nations who have gone through this and survived quite well. It is the right thing to do.

Anyone who professes a belief in the sovereignty of the individual has to support equal rights for homosexuals or they are a hypocrite. The conservative value of supremacy of the individual over that of the collective cannot be subject only to a protected class, or we're not talking about a Republic anymore. If a basis of discrimination is founded on a biblical belief, fine. The deep personal relationship between you and whatever you think created you is just that. It's not a basis for governing over your fellow citizens unless it also has secular value. Discrimination in this case does not meet that test. Feel like quoting Leviticus? I'll come right back at you with a bushel full of other excerpts from the bible that haven't found their way into law for some very evident reasons. So if you profess your faith in a 2000 yr old tome, as the word of god....don't be picking and choosing only those tenets that you want to live with.

Whenever a debate is had between myself [or other supports of individual rights] and fierce opponents of gay marriage, DADT, gays in general, etc...the opposition argument always centers on the sexual act. They do this in an attempt to elicit an emotional response towards the conditioning that we've all grown up laboring under. The meme is that two guys together sexually is...icky. Well the mental image doesn't exactly get my motor running, but I note my own hypocrisy where it pertains to two women in a similar situation. And by looking at sales of pornography....I'm hardly alone.

The debate from the oppositions side never addresses the fact that gay men and women are chemically and biologically attracted to another consenting adult It merely happens to be of the same sex. The idea of dating to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with in a committed relationship seems to be lost on these opponents. Admittedly, many spectacles of Pride Parades and such haven't helped their image, but these are a minority, no matter how often the Allegedly Liberal Media replays them.

In the military specifically, DADT ran counter to the core values that the military espouses. The focus of repeal is centered on hypotheses of increased casualties, plummeting morale and incidents of violence. What is almost never inserted is the fact that all of the above would be instigated by straight soldiers. So opponents would have you believe that the military would suffer [even herald the end of our nation if you listen to some prominent religious homophobes], but the fact that the immaturity, bigotry and sedition of straight soldiers at the core of all of these hypotheses are conveniently left out. Sort of like the battered women syndrome....sure I beat her...but she was asking for it, she didn't know her place.

I debate this quite often on a few MIL/LEO discussion forums, and though there are few voices of reason, the general meme is what I laid out above. Few are armed with logic or reason, but emotion abounds.