Posted on 01/14/2009 2:34:57 PM PST by Zakeet
President Obama will end the 15-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy that has prevented homosexual and bisexual men and women from serving openly within the U.S. military, a spokesman for the president-elect said.
Obama said during the campaign that he opposed the policy, but since his election in November has made statements that have been interpreted as backpedaling. On Friday, however, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, responding on the transition team's Web site to a Michigan resident who asked if the new administration planned to get rid of the policy, said:
"You don't hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it's 'Yes'."
The little-noticed response, made in a video posted on change.gov, made barely a ripple outside blogs focused on the gay community, but that's not surprising, said those who have been pushing to overturn the ban. Not only was Obama's position expected, they said, but support for reviewing or repealing the policy has grown markedly in recent years, including from some unexpected quarters.
The end of "don't ask, don't tell" may not happen immediately, several critics of the policy said. Although they appreciate clarity from Obama on the issue, they anticipate that the demands of the economy and two wars are likely to trump a speedy policy reversal.
"The question isn't if we do it and the question isn't when we do it, it's how we do it," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, whose 2006 bill to repeal the ban earned broad support among Democrats in Congress but did not move forward in the face of a near-certain veto by President Bush.
"I'm going to reintroduce the bill in the next few weeks," Tauscher said. "We've got the American people behind us."
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Join the NRA
first I have never seen a man and woman in bed in my room I shared in the military but if I did then it is quite normal for them to be in bed it is not normal but more of a disgusting perverted act if I see two men in bed together why do you not feel sick if you saw two men having sex? I would In the military, sex in the BEQ is not permitted.
Well, that’s one way to neuter the military. It will be interesting to see how this translates at the barracks level.
I can see that guy as a First Sergeant ...
“Private! What are you looking at!! I come from Kansas City. And all that comes from Kansas, is steers and queers...and I ain’t no steer”
The point is that there the sexual element does no good when it’s introduced into the combat team, regardless of orientation. The fact that large numbers of service members consider the behavior abnormal only makes it less likely to improve the unit.
I served too and truthfully, I have mixed feelings about this. The fact of the matter is there are mission critical MOS's that go unfilled because of lack of manpower.
I have served with at least three people I suspected and one that was fairly open about it. He was a corpsman attached to a Marine Weapons company that I commanded. He was, to use the vernacular, a flamer. Honestly, no one cared and it was frequently joked about in his company. But, he was the best Corpsman I had in almost 20 years of service. He was the brightest, most squared-away and was always motivated and hard charging. I certainly could have made the case and had him removed from service. Or, I could look the other way and made sure my men were given the best medical possible. I chose the latter - and no one complained publicly or privately.
However, I understand that my experience was probably an exceptional one, and many things are overlooked in a combat zone that might otherwise cause great morale and disciplinary problems. Also, we are having this jammed down the throat of the military by a man who has never served and can't begin to understand the command challenges of implementing this on a platoon, company or battalion level.
I'm afraid that the lifting of Don't Ask/Don't Tell will cause more disciplinary problems than manpower shortages it may solve.
If true, he may be repeating all the mistakes of the Clinton’s first term. Piss off the military supporters, social conservatives with this move. Then raise taxes, then try to expand the government with giant new health care programs. This is the formula that gave us 1994. Now where is our Newt?
_____________________________________
Making Global Warming Commericals with Nancy Pelosi. I don’t want another Newt. I want another Reagan. I want ten more Reagans. No, make that Ten million new Reagans.
THis is the point that a few here don’t seem to get.
There’s a lot worse than homosexuals in this world, and the armed forces actively seek them out. Maybe your sons haven’t done a rational risk assessment, here.
_____________________________
I don’t know what you are talking about with this rational risk assessment. Some kind of sarcasm? In battle there is no privacy, and on base there is even less. We expect our military to give “all” for their country including their very lives and then stupid politicians insist upon conducting social experimentation within the ranks. And the military shouldn’t complain? Sheesh, I’m surprised that moral hasn’t already hit bottom.
The attitudes of people joining the military will inevitably be influenced by societal attitudes. Future soldiers don’t grow up in a vacuum.
______________________________________
You’re right people don’t grow up in a vacuum. But you are wrong. Dead wrong. The overwhelming majority of service men and women won’t tolerate this. I spend a lot of time on an army base and I have a son actively serving in the Navy. 90% of what I come across are troops who don’t care about homosexuality outside of the military, but due to the unique environment of military life, alternative lifestyles are not found sickening, they are moral killers.
Or getting dressed and undressed a foot from members of the opposite sex? In the co-ed military, private facilities (even jury rigged) are provided for private body functions.
The ick factor of serving in close quarters, for every body function, with open homosexuals- no privacy. And having to witness canoodling within your own space. Bet on it.
But it won't be long before the gays are demanding separate facilities. Sexual harassment by predatory gays on fellow soldiers...a whole new ballgame and much harder to stop and control than man-woman harassment...not to mention a whole new set of “diversity” and “sensitivity” training courses, mandatory.
Don't even get me going on medical issues.
There is NO BAN on gays serving now- as long as they do so a-sexually. As normal heteros do.
DON'T TELL. We won't ask, We really don't want to know.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive in that exchange, but my point is that we have evolving societal standards of what we discriminate on that involve both "who you are" and "what you do". There are those who believe that homosexuality fits in the former category, and those who believe it fits in the latter category. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't make any difference. Just as laws cannot wipe out religious beliefs (they simply go underground), laws cannot influence sexual orientation, only the expression of it.
If you have laws, rules, regulations, whatever, that prohibit activities within a military organization, be they heterosexual, homosexual, or nonsexual, you can effectively control that expression of them. We cannot discourage homosexual people into being straight. We can only ask people to keep it in their pants, so to speak, when we hire them to do a job.
LOL! Oh, ok. Whatever you say. Maybe they don’t want to be reminded that they’re abnormal? Perverted? Of course it can’t be that.
They just don't need a hassle from anybody who clearly disagrees with their orientation. If you were a Presbyterian who kept ragging on his Methodist neighbors, I doubt that anybody outside your church would want to talk religion with you, as well. Especially if your religious discourse was to tell them they were abnormal or going to hell. Now, we don't have people talking like that to people of other religions anymore, but we still have folks talking like that about sexual preference. I don't blame anybody who wants to avoid such a conversation with someone who is fixated on who they sleep with.
Yep, I lived a really sheltered life.
Well, your profile has zero information about you. Thank you for supplying some. Clearly, you have been exposed to a wide variety of people in Philly and DC. I meant no insult.
Yes, the pics shown here show some pretty shocking stuff. But they are posted by people who want to shock. It's like taking the grossest excesses of Woodstock and generalizing them to all Vietnam protests, and all rock concerts. I'm sure my grandmother believed that image, she never went to a peaceful war protest or a rock concert, and the images that the nightly news used to shock people of her generation were effective in doing so.
We have a lot of people here at FR who are dead set against homosexuality, and I respect their opinion. Where I deeply disagree with them is in the legislation of it all. We could not make alcohol less desirable by prohibiting it, we have not made drugs less addictive by filling the prisons with users, and we cannot legislate a gay man to desire a woman, any more than we can pass a law making either you or I find people of our own gender sexually attractive.
Gay men and lesbians know that their lives wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if the muzzies ever took over the world and imposed islammunist law. It's tragic to lose an Arabic interpreter who could help us save US troops by quickly translating an intercepted communication, just because he is homosexual. It's costly to lose a trained helicopter pilot because it's come out that she has a girlfriend back home that she's fighting for the freedom of, as well as for the rest of us. I'd rather have her busting the balls of the most sexist men on the face of the planet in islammunist nations than have her deal with a court-martial over an orientation that does not involve her conduct while on duty.
Dislike homosexuality as much as you want. Go to your grave feeling deep in your heart that when they go to theirs, your version of God will send them to eternal damnation. But when they work to serve the country that lets you worship as you please, don't stand in their way of defending your freedom and mine.
Alert level raised to lavender!
I suspect they’ll steal the word “foxhole” and pervert it towards their own ends.
Wow. As if our military didn’t have enough problems keeping good soldiers in, now they are going to be housed with known poofters.
Can a draft be far behind?
Your argument is worthless because in BHO’s eyes, and those of his stripe, the Constitution is a “living” document; to wit: He will make it to mean whatever his minions find convenient for their cause at the time. Remember this is the man who stated “the Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document.”
Everything Adolph Hitler did, he did under color of “law” ... so please spare me the argument of legality. There is a higher law: the moral code. Americans have lost sight of THAT “law” written by our Creator, and hence we have the perversion of all law... and the ascendancy of reprobate men, such as is BHO, to fill the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our local, state and federal governments. Now the last American bastion of decency and the moral code - our military - is targeted for the systematic infiltration of moral ambiguity and perversity. This is how Germany fell. This is how the Roman republic fell … first the people, then the government… and lastly the military. WE ARE FOLLOWING THAT SAME COURSE!
As I posted previous, blind obedience to that which is clearly designed to create disunity among the rank and file soldier, and destroy general morale among the military services as a whole, is insanity.
We are being effectively destroyed by that which we hold superior: the “law,” or, more precisely, “legalism.” Knowing the history of tyrannical regimes… if President BHO writes an executive order that commands the U.S. military to disarm American civilians, would you expect our soldiers “obey” that order, even though its execution would be a clear violation of the Second Amendment (which may only be altered through Congress by a constitutional amendment, passed by 2/3 of the state legislatures)? The Divine Law is wisdom and justice; legalism possesses neither virtue. Remember your Old Testament, and the ‘Book of Judges.’ When the people are corrupt, then the law will be corrupt… and the nation will fall.
BHO will act to destroy or severely weaken our military, just as he will act to undermine our culture, and thus “reprogram” Americans to fit the “new paradigm”... following his “orders”... those that are written in the communist manifesto. Or have you already forgotten the cabal with whom Barak Hussein Obama associated, until it became no longer politically expedient?
The Constitution is not a suicide pact, especially when a Marxist, or an adept of socialist teachings, is the one interpreting its meaning. How far must we drift from our moorings before individuals, such as your self, “grow a set” and determine to take committed action? By the time you acknowledge our peril, it will be to late to act. I would argue that not only have we broken free of the moorings, we are on a speed boat moving at full throttle towards the falls. We are definitely living in times analogous to the frog in the pot. This is how republics die… slowly by increasing degrees of indifference. While legalists are busy fiddling, the American Republic burns. There is a maxim written that if one does not fight when he may win, then there will come atime where he must fight knowing he will loose. Your contentions exemplify that maxim.
“Thank you stay at home conservatives and third party voters.”
Sory, we don’t vote for scumbag liberals. Yours OR theirs.
Moral relativist, eh?
Perhaps you are just ugly :)
For BAD, children have been taught by BIG Government Public Schools, television and hollywood that filth and perversion are a neutral thing or even a good thing.
The attitudes of people who are influenced by twelve or more years of a daily indoctrination of filth in a tax-funded, Big Government Public School, college or university will line up moving further to the left until there is no longer a recognizable USA.
Future soldiers don't grow up in a vacuum, they are influenced by a culture of filth.
All this said, the fraudulent and illegal powerplay by liberal SCOTUS's to reinvent the first amendment's meaning concerning religion and all other things has had a continuing corrosive impact on the populace's ablity to preserve their law and their culture. This has allowed the far left clones of the anti-American ACLU lovers to engage in illegal social engineering.
This helps explain the election of BHO and the other far left fanatics.
You will still find brainwashed liberals on Free Republic repeating the far left opinions of the ACLU as if they had good reasoning.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.