I have two pieces of anecdotal evidence to share with regard to gays in the military.
First, a note to my left wing extremist Clinton hater friends. If you google Don’t Ask Don’t Tell you will learn that this is the Clinton Administration policy which banned gays from the military. Well, Clinton became president in 1993. I was in Northwestern University Reserve Officer Training Corps from 1989 until 1993, and every semester I was there I signed a piece of paper swearing that I was not gay. In fact, there was quite a stir about kicking ROTC units off campus because they didn’t admit gays. All before Bill Clinton banned gays from the military. Moral of the story: Bill Clinton did not ban gays from the military. He made a compromise that turned out to be no compromise at all. There ended up being plenty of asking despite the new policy codified at 10 USC 654. Failing make things better for gays in the military is pretty different from banning gays from the military.
Second, although I see very little opposition to gays in the military these days, I feel compelled to point out that I served on board USS Billfish with four guys that were variously out. One MM1 was completely out. One YNC may or may not have been gay, but everyone on the ship assumed he was gay. Finally a couple of ST2’s accepted $75 to let the completely out guy give them oral sex. Or at least that was the rumor, and for my purposes here, that is good enough. Billfish never failed to get underway on time because of the presence of these guys on the ship. No one tried to beat them up. Everything worked just fine. My point: it is stupid to ban gays from the military.
2 replies on “Anecdotal Evidence on Gays in the Military”
If you mean me, I never blamed Clinton for DADT. I blame Sam Nunn. Seriously, I blame Clinton only for having an ambition that exceeded his political savvy. He picked the right fight and got his ass handed to him. It sucked, and he learned from it, and perhaps more importantly Obama has learned from it.
I’m seriously disappointed that Obama isn’t moving on DADT just now. On the other hand, I have to admit that universal health care is like way more important now, as is fixing the economy and winning the war and all the other stuff he’s working on. DADT can be fixed next year, and anyway, it just may be that Obama is playing that rope-a-dope game where he’s gonna let Setzak push a bill through congress and then sign it… I dunno. At this point I am just gonna assume that he means what he says when he says he’s committed to changing the policy, and I am gonna assume that he knows what he’s doing.
I didn’t mean you, although I understand the confusion because you would be my left wing extremist friend. I meant my left wing extremist “friends” at the Progress Report that sent a note talking about how Obama needed to undo Clinton’s ban on gays, and all my left wing extremist “friends” that wrote the many google-able articles about the same.