A less efficient military isn't always a bad thing

The 1993 ban on gay and lesbian service in the military is one of the stupidest tales in a very stupid pair of decades given that butch homos and uniformed lesbies have been part of every military force in history and always will be. ‘Don’t ask/Don’t tell/Don’t Pursue/Don’t Harass’ harmed people’s lives and fanned homophobia, and it worsened the situation for people trying to keep a low profile because it was always based on a lie—that if you were discreet, you’d be left alone.

In fact, the Clinton collapse on non-discrimination led to immediate hounding, snooping and entrapment designed to weed out gays—exactly what that hypocrite promised would not happen. I’m always amazed by the gay advocacy groups’ ability to forget what a disaster good ol’ Bill was when he actually had the power to affect gay and lesbian lives—as opposed to issuing warm boilerplate and smiling benignly over what ‘should’ theoretically be done by other people.

After Clinton came up with his disastrous, phony compromise, gay men and lesbians in the service experienced increased harassment, assaults, witchhunts (especially at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey CA—gays are famously adept at learning foreign languages) while their commanding officers were completely AWOL on their alleged duties to address racial and sexual harassment. I wonder if the detectives who missed Nidal Hasan, the wacko psychiatrist/gunman at Fort Hood, were too busy tracking down who was singing Broadway musical numbers to himself in the shower instead.

On the other hand, I can’t help applauding one aspect of this hateful and reactionary policy, which is that it caused the armed forces to shoot itself in the collective foot and weaken illegitimate U.S. enterprises like the conquest of Iraq and the torture of defenseless detainees, especially in the Arab world. Every time I read about the firing of hundreds of interpreters and translators as part of the antigay crusade, I say to myself, Too bad for them, but good for the eventual victims of the criminal machinery of which they too often form a part.