Monday, December 6, 2010

Don’t ask don’t tell,

While I completely agree on the point that gay’s shouldn’t have to hide their identities when serving in our military, I believe you are missing a few key points. DADT was not entirely put into actions by our society’s homophobia. The issue of soldiers not being openly gay in the military is a performance issue as well.
Were there intimate relationships between gay soldiers in the same platoon, decisions in the field and military actions would be compromised due to the extra emotions they would have for each other. Who would be able to defuse a bomb or evacuate hostages after seeing their wife, mom, dad, or sibling be shot and die right in front of them? Almost no one would be completely unaffected, and therein lies the problem.
Soldiers are trained to be hard, tough, and have the ability to carry out orders regardless of the situation. Having to worry about someone who you’re intimately involved with while on active duty is the same reason that married couples are not allowed to work together, or near each other if both are serving. While I do believe there is also open homophobia fueling the DADT policy, I also believe DADT has been put in place because a solution has yet to be proposed that would allow gays to openly serve, while not compromising the integrity of our armed forces.

1 comment:

visibleinc said...

Robert,

It would seem if that were the true purpose behind DADT, then DADT would only be restricted to combat / infantry jobs in the military. This is not the case.

Women are a growing presence (around about 20%) in the military and perform a number of crucial non-combat jobs. Obviously, any argument you make about personal relationships between military personnel will apply to a situation where women are working along side men. Not only would the same arguments apply, but the effect would be expected to be much greater-- homosexuals make up a small percentage of society so the probability of two homosexuals finding a match in the military would have to be quite a bit smaller than the probability of a heterosexual male finding a female.

At any rate, I hope we can at least agree that when it comes to non-combat units, discriminating against homosexuals doesn't really have a logical grounding.

-Van