A Few Good Gays

I'm a heterosexual man. Mr first crush on a girl was at the age of five, and aside from the knee-weakening power of Andy Lau, I've not questioned the allure of a female's vagoo. I'm also an American. I was born in the United States, so I speak English fluently, to the detriment of my native Taiwanese. Any time I want to get my ideas clearly and concretely, I get somebody to translate for me.

So why would the military, with much greater stakes than "what do you want to eat tonight?" decide that a personnel's sexuality is more important than their linguistic skills?

For years (yes, it's been that long) the White House has been drumming it into our heads that we, Americans, are under the threat of terrorist attacks at any given time. You could be bombed at work. You could be sniped while commuting to work. You could be injected with anthrax via the television broadcast waves of "the liberal media conspiracy." The Department of Homeland Security was created for two purposes: One, to make it a frickin' hassle to get out of/into the country, and two, to give us that Terror Alert graph.

Look at this piece of crap. Every single color on there is associated with some level of danger. The implication is that a NO TIME are you safe. I mean look, even forest green, possibly the most serene of all existing colors, has low risk rather than none at all. I know, it's not very realistic to say there's never a risk. Hell, look what happened last time we were caught flat-footed. But from top to bottom, the thing is blatantly designed to make you crap your pants over hypothetical levels of danger.

Officially, we engaged in Gulf War II (Electric Boogaloo) to overthrow a despot who was planning to attack America with WMDs. Realistically, everyone knows that Bush personally wanted to kick Saddam in the nuts because hey, it worked for his dad. I'm not going to debate whether Hussein was a terrible country leader, that's too one-sided and we all agree he's scum. But his absence has left an undeniable vacuum of power that so far we've only been able to plug by throwing in wave after wave of our own men.

No one has a clue how to come out a winner. If we pull out now, some other tyrant will grab the top office. We stay, and we bleed ourselves dry for a conflict that we started in the first place. Bush won't commit to a time line or a fixed budget because he has no idea how much it'll cost (and he's never balanced his own budget). In a situation like this, you'd think he'd throw everything he had his disposal. it hasn't come to that yet, but it will.

And yet, gays. Able-bodied individuals fit and willing to serve their country's military. And boy howdy, is that last qualification hard to find these days. Better yet, they speak Arab, a handy skill when you're ordered to occupy an Arab-speaking country. So you've got people who want to help, and have the skills to help in great ways. They just like their partner's sex organs to mirror their own. So they get kicked to the curb.

Wait, what?

That's right. If America was locked inside a death trap with a man who could read the instructions on how to get out, he'd strangle him first for wearing a pink triangle.

You suck, America. You're so goddamn homophobic that you're making choices that are obviously wrong to even junior high kids (I know, I asked my students). Forget for a moment that you're afraid of anybody who doesn't watch NASCAR on the weekends after hitting on the head cheerleader. If you want a job done, you're going to have to pick WHO CAN DO THE JOB, not what they do in their spare time.

What's distressing to me is that the military chose the content of the messages as grounds for discharge, rather than his method. If they had kicked him out for using a "secret level" computer for personal use, I'd have no problem with that. Computers designated for high security data transfer shouldn't be used for Instant Messaging. But no, it's where his likes to stick his pecker is the overlying issue. Congratulations, Homophobic America, you just made us weaker.