I had not heard that, but I’ll take your word for it. In a way they’ve always been ‘second class’ among the services, probably because they’re less susceptible to deployments and direct combat. It’s too bad about that perception. I have a few friends who went in after high school and remained, and they say that the political correctness is overboard, and readiness suffers because of that. I can’t imagine what it would be like being assigned to a cutter where a large portion of the crew are sodomites. NOT GOOD.
This was yet another problem which surfaced in the USCG. My late father was a 24 year veteran of the USCG, and a Chief Warrant Officer 3 when he retired. I, myself grew up with the Coast Guard, although my service was done in the Army. The observations I gave were not really mine, but those of my father who saw the changes first hand. When the USCG became a front line force in the drug war, corruption entered into his beloved Coast Guard, and that both angered, and saddened him. Ditto with the overboard "PC".
He saw his Coast Guard morph from a service mostly dedicated to saving lives in sea rescues to something else entirely. Another drastic change will morph the USCG even more, perhaps to its ultimate detriment...
the infowarrior