Bigot questions military study

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Michael

A bigot has raised bigot-based questions on a military study.

Directly challenging the Pentagon’s top leadership, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain on Thursday snubbed a military study on gays as flawed and said letting gays serve openly would be dangerous in a time of war.

McCain also said Adm. Mike Mullen’s opinion didn’t matter as much as other military leader’s opinions because he doesn’t directly lead troops. Mullen had one hell of a response.

“With all due respect, Mr. Chairman and Sen. McCain, it is true that, as chairman, I am not in charge of troops. But I have commanded three ships, a carrier battle group and two fleets. And I was most recently a service chief myself. For more than 40 years I have made decisions that affected and even risked the lives of young men and women.

“You do not have to agree with me on this issue. But don’t think for one moment that I haven’t carefully considered the impact of the advice I give on those who will have to live with the decisions that that advice informs. I would not recommend repeal of this law if I did not believe in my soul that it was the right thing to do for our military, for our nation and for our collective honor.”

McCain would absolutely not question this study if it gave him the results he wanted. He’s just a typical bigoted Republican, arguing from his biases, not any sort of objectivity. What’s worse, he’s making our military weaker by allowing this unconstitutional law to remain in place.

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Pentagon: Gays? Not a problem.

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Michael

Harry Reid is promising to bring to a vote a repeal on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell soon. The legislation will be contingent on the president and top military commanders certifying that doing so will not harm the effectiveness of the military. And what does an assessment by the Pentagon say about it all?

A draft of the 370-page assessment has found that the ban could be lifted with little harm and that most troops don’t object to the change in personnel policy, according to officials familiar with its findings.

Of course, it isn’t that simple.

But it also found that some troops had serious concerns with repealing the law.

Military officials have warned that even scattered resistance to the change could pose logistical and discipline problems for field commanders.

That is true. But desegregating the military had the same issues. We need to take a pragmatic approach to this. It’s clear that gays ought to have the right to serve the United States of America. No non-bigot doubts that. The question is how doing what’s right will impact our fighting and defending capabilities. The leak of the report indicates that the change in policy isn’t going to be much different from when we finally allowed minorities and whites to fight side by side. The obvious conclusion is that DADT needs to be repealed so that we might better our military with a broader pool of intelligent men and women.

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Fourteen year old gives an incredible speech

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Michael

A fourteen year old student came to the defense of his teacher who was suspended for kicking two students out of class. One of the kids that was kicked out was wearing a Confederate flag. The other one made anti-gay remarks. Both clearly have a lot of growing up to do and clearly required discipline. The student who stood up and made an amazing speech was Graeme Taylor and he did it at a school board meeting. It’s worth it to watch the video.

(If anyone knows how to get the embedding code, I would appreciate it.)

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The case of Genesio Oliveira

Posted on November 9, 2010 by Michael

Genesio Oliveira and Tim Coco are married in the United States. But that doesn’t mean they’re being treated equally.

The couple were temporarily separated when Mr Oliveira’s bid for asylum over claims he was raped in Brazil as a teenager was rejected on the grounds he was not physically affected.

But in June Senator John Kerry intervened and urged officials to temporarily allow Mr Oliveira back into the country and to return to the home he shares with Mr Coco in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

His return was granted on humanitarian grounds, but now Attorney General Eric Holder has refused to change his mind on the original decision.

It means the Brazilian could be forced out with six months, a decision which has drawn criticism from gay rights groups.

What’s the justification here? How is this good? A legitimately married couple want to live in the U.S.; one spouse is a U.S. citizen. This seems pretty straight forward.

But, then, a majority of Americans are disinterested in civil rights for everyone.

Filed under: Politics and Social, Rights, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Uganda is a terrible place

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Michael

It’s just awful.

More than 20 homosexuals have been attacked over the last year in Uganda, and an additional 17 have been arrested and are in prison, said Frank Mugisha, the chairman of Sexual Minorities Uganda. Those numbers are up from the same period two years ago, when about 10 homosexuals were attacked, he said.

This all has come after the introduction of an anti-gay bill that would have imposed the death penalty on gays. (The bill eventually died.) By attacking the basic rights of gays, the legislators in Uganda have incited an increasing uprising against them; pretend like gays should have fewer or different rights than heterosexuals and you’re asking for discrimination. We see it all the time in the United States; Uganda has taken it to the extreme.

But you say you aren’t convinced of the similarities between what happens here and what happens in Uganda? How about the perpetuation of myths, then?

The Oct. 9 article in a Ugandan newspaper called Rolling Stone – not the American magazine – came out five days before the one-year anniversary of the controversial legislation. The article claimed that an unknown but deadly disease was attacking homosexuals in Uganda, and said that gays were recruiting 1 million children by raiding schools, a common smear used in Uganda.

Sounds an awful lot like that dastardly HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA!!ONE1!!, doesn’t it? Oh, but maybe it’s just one of them there backward places, huh? Well…

Rolling Stone does not have a large following in Uganda, a country of 32 million where about 85 percent of people are Christian and 12 percent are Muslim.

They do have very strong backwards thinking, but it derives from the same place as much of the backwards thinking in the U.S.

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Gay rejection stay in place

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Michael

As expected, a federal appeals court has issued a stay in regards to DADT.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday temporarily granted the U.S. government’s request for a freeze on a judge’s order requiring the military to allow openly gay troops.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals instructed lawyers for the gay rights group that brought the lawsuit successfully challenging the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to file arguments in response by Monday.

This isn’t the worst setback in the world. It’s merely a matter of time before equality is granted to all U.S. citizens wishing to serve in the military. We’ll be a safer nation for it.

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U.S. military: Open to gays

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Michael

Finally.

The military is accepting openly gay recruits for the first time in the nation’s history, even as it tries in the courts to slow the movement to abolish its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

At least two service members discharged for being gay began the process to re-enlist after the Pentagon’s Tuesday announcement.

Unfortunately, there still exists the possibility of this policy changing (though probably only temporarily), so many civil rights groups for gays are advising that people don’t come out of the closet just yet. It takes time to tear down blind bigotry.

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Immediate don’t ask, don’t tell injunction

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Michael

The courts have traditionally been the place where the immorality of bigoted Americans has gone to die. Today is no different.

A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday immediately stopping enforcement of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, suspending the 17-year-old ban on openly gay U.S. troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling also ordered the government to suspend and discontinue all pending discharge proceedings and investigations under the policy.

The Obama Administration is under no obligation to challenge this. It’s unclear what this administration will do, especially this close to midterm elections, but I feel decent about the right decision being made. A challenge to this ruling would be a slap in the face to all the gay people who serve the United States in uniform, not to mention a weakening of our military. There’s no rational justification in DADT and it needs to stop.

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Almost sorry

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Michael

There is an excellent post over at The Stranger by Dan Savage. A listener to his radio show wrote him complaining of the way he placed responsibility on bigots for what happened to Tyler Clementi.

As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man that took his own life after being humiliated by people who should have known better. I think you need to be aware of your own prejuduces and how they might play into your thinking. At best I think your comments were hypocritical.

If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preferance, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)?

I’ll get to Savage’s response in a second, but he didn’t directly address the listener’s question, so I want to tackle that first.

What is the difference between judging a group based on sexual orientation and judging a group based on any other reason? That question is a non-starter since it’s so incoherent, but the listener does give the specific example of faith. So how is that different? This isn’t that hard. Even though people probably adhere to the same religion as their parents, people do have a choice in their religion. They do choose to have faith, the idea that belief without evidence is a virtue. They choose to base their lives on certain doctrine and dogma. Sexual orientation, on the other hand, is entirely different. That same level of choosing simply does not exist. I can choose to be gay no more than a gay woman can choose to prefer men.

But I like Savage’s response better:

I’m sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.

No, wait. I’m not. Gay kids are dying. So let’s try to keep things in perspective: fuck your feelings.

…

Being told that they’re sinful and that their love offends God, and being told that their relationships are unworthy of the civil right that is marriage (not the religious rite that some people use to solemnize their civil marriages), can eat away at the souls of gay kids. It makes them feel like they’re not valued, that their lives are not worth living. And if one of your children is unlucky enough to be gay, the anti-gay bigotry you espouse makes them doubt that their parents truly love them—to say nothing of the gentle “savior” they’ve heard so much about, a gentle and loving father who will condemn them to hell for the sin of falling in love with the wrong person.

I wish we could see a lot more of this in the political realm. Of course, that would require honesty.

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Tyler Clementi

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Michael

It would be disingenuous and misguided of me to pretend like I can at all relate to what happened to Tyler Clementi. I’m a white male whose biggest claim to having anything remotely close to a hardship is being an atheist. The stigma that surrounds my lack of belief is trivial in comparison to what gays and other minorities go through. And there’s a significant difference: I choose to be an atheist. Tyler Clementi didn’t choose to be gay, no more than one chooses to be black or white. That was his identity – and he was forced to keep it in the ‘closet’. We have society to blame for that.

Minorities have been held down and ostracized and mocked ever since early humans began to notice the superficial differences we have between us. But how many minorities have been forced to stay silent on who they were? Blacks have historically been kicked, but they haven’t been forced to hide the physical color of their skin as a routine matter. The same goes for all racial minorities. This doesn’t make their plight any less significant or less important than any other plight, but it does make the discrimination gays face a unique beast. Gays are in the unique position where they can disguise who they are. The horribly hateful bigots out there take advantage of this, proclaiming the existence of some fairytale ‘homosexual agenda’, suggesting homosexuals want to teach gay sex to children, among all the other ugly lies we hear every day. This forces many gays to keep a major defining aspect of their lives a complete secret; fear drives them to hide who they are.

That’s why Tyler Clementi killed himself. If society accepted who he was because, damn it, he’s a human being and deserves at least as much, he would still be alive. He would graduate in three and a half years from Rutgers University, ready to contribute as much as he could to society, to his family, to his friends, to his own well-being. Instead we’re left with an unnecessary and permanent absence because that very society to which Tyler Clementi would have contributed so much is so immersed in a dark, dark hate.

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