Time To End “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Military, Sexuality, The War On TerrorismWhy? Well, if for no other reason than it’s seriously hindering our ability to fight the WoT.
The lack of qualified translators has been a pressing issue for some time � the Army had filled only half its authorized positions for Arabic translators in 2001. Cables went untranslated on Sept. 10 that might have prevented the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Today, the American Embassy in Baghdad has nearly 1,000 personnel, but only a handful of fluent Arabic speakers.I was an Arabic translator. After joining the Navy in 2003, I attended the Defense Language Institute, graduated in the top 10 percent of my class and then spent two years giving our troops the critical translation services they desperately needed. I was ready to serve in Iraq.
But I never got to. In March, I was ousted from the Navy under the “don’t ask, don’t tell� policy, which mandates dismissal if a service member is found to be gay.
It makes no sense to me whatsoever that we keep using the same old excuses to keep gays out of the military when nearly every other large military in the free world allows them to serve openly.
Well, it makes sense when you think that this is all motivated by religious ideology, which has no business deciding who can fight for our country and who can’t.
End “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” immediately.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 and is filed under Military, Sexuality, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 12th, 2007 at 4:08 am
The sexual orientation of soldiers aside, what seems to me the largest problem facing our nations armed services is the lack of support from the general public. While you will always be able to find your [diehard] patriots, which will serve no matter the reasons for going to war, no matter the justifications given, I truly believe that most Americans want to know what they are fighting for is just and inline with America’s long held tenets–that we are on the right side of the moral divide. With this war I think a large portion of the public don’t have that sense. Without that, I don’t believe any war that America is involved in can sustain itself without breaking our military. No matter how many all-volunteer soldiers sigh up, redeployments and stop-losses you put in place–it will all be for not.
It’s my opinion that this war in Iraq is unjust. If it weren’t unjust you would have no problem finding recruits to fight it. After 9/11 the president decided to divert our forces from an arguably just war in Afghanistan and embroil them instead in a war that is morally questionable and more harmful to our security than helpful.
Even if Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was abolished, no amount of gay recruits would fix the image of this war being “the wrong war, for the wrong reasons.” If we would have stuck to fighting terrorism and hunting down Osama Bin Ladin, I think we would still be holding the moral high ground and the military would probably be
meeting its quotas and then some.
I can speak for myself. As an American I would be know doubt sign up if our country were under a pressing threat. I don’t think most Americans would think otherwise. However, when you have a corrupt person in the presidential office that is abusing American military prowess for his own ends (whatever they may be) that makes many Americans feel, well, UnAmerican and makes patriotic Americans feel ashamed of their country rather than proud of it.
I’m not a pacifist, but I am not a bully either. I think we could be showing the world how America is the most beautiful country in the world but it is not going to happen when we are preemptively invading other countries without just cause, that is not the way America is supposed to do things.
June 12th, 2007 at 7:32 am
More than a little ironic, that our military still has this policy while at the same time considering a weapon designed to turn enemy soldiers temporarily gay (see a couple of posts down).
June 12th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
and who said the WOT didn’t have something useful to offer to the liberal agenda…it is always good to see the NYT taking such an active interest in national security…on its days off from actively undermining our nation security. good times, indeed.