[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

This whole "oh, if a gay man sees me without my clothes on, he's just going to be unable to control himself and he'll rape me" hysteria is ridiculous a straw man fallacy.

No one has asserted what you say above (hence the straw man fallacy). What has been asserted (and is in fact true) is that a sexually active gay contingent within the military is destined to damage unit cohesion. And that is exactly what happened in the article above. Open homosexual behavior would do far worse.

[kenboy]

Open homosexual behavior would do far worse.

You know, I don't think it would. But I'll be honest about it and say I don't know. Tell you what: let's study the situation and see how allies like Israel and the UK handle these issues, and we'll see what they learned from their experiences, and we'll use their learning as a starting point for us. Rather than listening to individual soldiers tell us that they don't care who's in the foxhole with them or that they know gays only join the military to recruit, as we've seen on this thread, let's look at the unit cohesion experiences in these other countries. If it's been a disaster, then maybe we should keep the UCMJ as it is -- though, I think maybe banning anal (and depending on how you read it, anal) sex between opposite-sex couples is a bit archaic.

And regardless of whether or not one's sexual orientation is a choice or not, it sure seems to me that this "unit cohesion" argument is the same one used 60 years ago to justify keeping the military segregated.

There are policies in place to deal with unwanted sexual advances, should a gay soldier be stupid enough to make them on a straight soldier. In this case, it seems like the only reason unit cohesion (the unit being ... the choir) was damaged was because DADT exists. If this soldier, like his straight single fellow soldiers, was allowed to sleep with whatever single civilian he wanted too off-base, the unit would still be fine.