Pride Jewelry

Lt. Dan Choi for the NO H8 Campaign

I was hoping that the whole Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy of the US military had pretty much fallen by the wayside, how naive of me.

I find it unsettling that in this day in age, when there is a shortage of soldiers the American military would throw out quality soldiers and ranking officers because they are gay while accepting those they would never even have considered only 5 years ago. I am talking about gangsters and thugs, people with anger and actual mental problems!

Lt. Dan Choi and Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach are two exemplary examples of men the military needs but due to the fact that they haven’t hid the fact they are gay, they are on their way out the door with a swift kick in the pants for good measure. Doesn’t the US Army (and Navy, Marines, Air Force) realize that by loading off the experienced and talented leaders they are endangering the lives of everyone else? What do you think is more important to most, serving under (not literally lol) a gay Lt or living to see their families again?

Let’s first take a look at openly gay Choi. He is an officer in the National Guard, is a 2003 West Point graduate as well as an Arabic speaker who spent 18 months in Iraq. Then there’s Fehrenbach who is a highly experienced 18-year Air Force veteran who has flown 88 combat missions and who is only two years away from his retirement.

These are the kind of servicemen and women we need more of over there in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guys who know what they are doing and in the case of Lt. Choi, who actually speak the language. Do you have any idea how few of our guys speak Arabic? It’s ridiculous that people expect the Iraqis to pull over or stop etc etc when they don’t understand English and that is all the soldiers speak. How can we send troops overseas without even a rudimentary knowledge of the language?? It’s not the Iraqi’s responsibility to learn English, it’s our military’s responsibility to teach the soldiers and officers Arabic. But I digress.

The whole Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell thing is completely ridiculous and insulting. As it stands now, unless President Obama gets involved, Choi and Fehrenbach will join the other 13,000 + service members who have been thrown out of the military over the last 16 years. And since Obama took office as President just a few months ago, there has been over 260 new removals. What happened to him being on the side of gays? What happened to him wanting to change things for the better?

Sure, he promised he would banish the whole Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy from the American Military, and sure he hasn’t done one single thing yet, but the White House says we needn’t worry. He is “still is committed to repealing” the policy. Yeah right. I will believe it when I see it.

If President Obama would put a halt to removing these good soldiers from service it would dramatically reduce the number of soldiers stop-lossed. They wouldn’t need so many replacements, therefor they wouldn’t need to keep soldiers past their original tours of duty. We are talking about skilled and experienced troops, whose only “flaw” is that they are gay individuals who don’t want to bang prostitutes to prove to the other guys they are as straight as everyone else.

There was a recent study that seems to prove that allowing gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly for a period, will do far more good than harm. Their results seem to show that this will actually add to unit cohesion rather than detract from it. Equal treatment needs to start NOW, not a few years down the line when the war has already been hopelessly lost along with thousands and thousands of soldiers who were unlucky enough to fall into units with unskilled and inexperienced leaders.

The fact of the matter is that the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is not just a gay issue, it is a national-security issue. The United States military is watching the armed forces struggle to meet recruitment goals, while throwing out 13,000 experienced troops and this only serves to reduce military readiness and make everyone less safe, both at home and abroad.

There is no excuse for this kind of inequality and irresponsibility, as Lt. Choi points out, it forces good servicemen and women to deceive and lie and others to tolerate deception and lying. And that “poisons a unit and cripples a fighting force.”

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