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Did you miss the fact that in this specific example we’re talking about people who are not in battlefield situations? They work in offices. Their homosexuality should not matter any more than that of the accountant who works in the office down the hall, or of the middle manager you sometimes see in the kitchen.

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that there is a valid case to be made for banning open homosexuality in battlefield conditions (even though the problem is more with the homophobes than the homosexuals, IMO) … how can that possibly apply in cases where the soldier’s job is in an office, not a battlefield?

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Do you seriously think it’s more important to enforce the anti-gay rule than it is to improve national security? There’s the advantage to the military … they can make an issue of it and fire the same translators that they then complain about not having enough of and desperately needing more of …. or they can apply the modicum of common sense needed to realize that in this case at least, sexual orientation has no relevance to the work.

I know anti-gay people define “making an issue of it” as meaning, not staying properly in the closet, but the rest of us seriously don’t see what the problem is.

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Because the military is under a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, I rather assume that the 20 people fired had themselves made an issue out of something that should have had no bearing on their job.

What advantage would possibly go to the military in changing this policy? Yes, I know a small handful of soldiers would feel better (and a larger percentage would be made uncomfortable), but I’m afraid the costs would far, far outweigh their personal emotions on the issue.

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The second problem with your argument is that the anti-gay policies in the military extend well beyond the battlefield. For example, at a time when we desperately need people who can translate Arabic to English, the military discharged at least 20 of them for no offense other than being homosexual.

These were not people in combat. These were people working in offices doing highly important national security work, told they were not suitable to do because of a trait that had absolutely no bearing on their jobs.

How is that not blatant discrimination?

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One of the things that being in the military does is prepares young people to work as a team, a skill that they will take with them back into civilian life. Learning to work with people who have different beliefs, different skin color, different eye color, different life experiences and different sexual orientation can only help as the person gets older. And if we are really lucky, perhaps they will learn to look at a person as a person and team mate first.

John M. I hope the classes are as open as the one you describe as well. Only by getting the questions asked and answered will we dispel the myths, misconceptions and outright lies that exist about gay people in general.

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Our ancestors, who knew something of sexual passion, would be astonished how we try to talk away Eros as such a neutered, tame, incidental little thing. Or maybe to jaded moderns, sexuality is ultimately a trifle and a bore, and sex just a mechanical reflex, like a dog scratching his ear.

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Young men who are not homophobic idiots should have no problem serving alongside homosexuals.

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