Obama signs repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell'
For gay rights campaigners, policy was notorious roadblock on way to full acceptance
WASHINGTON - December 22 — President Barack Obama signed a landmark law Wednesday repealing the ban on gay men and women serving openly in the military, fulfilling one of his major campaign pledges and casting the issue as a matter of civil rights long denied. (con't)
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44 comments:
Bill Hicks - Gays in the Military
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np6_b-72H3E
Or even Monty Python
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5Dfs7jqFI&feature=related
si me encanta!
muy mucho!
viva!
PD: hoy vi que B. se quedó dormido en plena sesión cabezeando y todo y me acordé de vos, pensé que ibas a publicar algo...
Funny clips J, some make the same arguments re. gay marriage ie, why would they want to get married in the first place? and sorry that doesn't hold water.
If everyone is equal before the law then everyone has the right to join the military, get married, adopt children, etc., or not.
Telling gays to stop militating against discrimination is like telling suffragettes "Why would you want the right to vote - it's a pointless exercise anyway"
Alelí el caimán suele dormirse en publico seguido, some say xq estuvo cogiendo all night long, otros que xq está enfermo, yo digo ojalá se vaya prontoooo.... one way or another! je je
me gustan estas news!
Felicidades tana!
felix todo Queen Mary!
No, come on, if you just had your leg blown off or saw your family fragged by a drone would you be saying, "at least it was done by an openly gay psycho who wasn't discriminated against, principles must be upheld!", I think you might wish there was a little more unfairness and internal dissent in the military.
If all the military did was to run around in mud and march up and down screaming at each other I wouldn't care much, but I'm sick of war, sick of paying for it and I really don't care if they don't let any more people do it or make the process more difficult.
It's not the same as marriage, or employment rights or any of that stuff, it's harming my world and costing me money.
But there you go, we're an evolving species.
MALA ONDA!!!!!!!!!!!
J- of course I hate war and wish it were abolished instantly and forever, personally i would never dream of joining the military,
but i still say yours is a false dichotomy and i'm happy gays can now serve openly, because discrimination is intolerable under any circumstance but especially repugnant in government institutions.
not too long ago black soldiers fought in segregated regiments, now a black man is in the white house... you see what i mean?
felicidades para vos tmb Muchacho desconocido
But it's a repugnant institution.
Anyway, enjoy your Christmas if you are into that
:)
J: i 2nd that motion and i enjoy xmas from a strictly folkloric point of view,
however speaking of repugnant institutions let's not forget the pope's latest act of christian charity: condemning condom use for birth control purposes, let's move on for chrissake!!! no pun intended
Oh, the UK was blessed with a special message from the pope this year. It was like listening to some rusty inquisition dungeon door swinging open - cre-e-e-eak - with a waft of the stench of madness, decay and suffering.
Thanks for that, Ratty!
hahahahahahahahah J - I see we agree on almost everything :))) And let's not forget the vales of tears of all those raped children.... In Italy we call him Nazinger...
Oh, pff, what's a few children mean after everything else? Just the chocolate sprinkles on a huge gateaux of crimes savoured by the clergy.
(I don't wanna be no) Catholic Boy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYVOVKFa57g&feature=related
you're just the kind of boy or girl I like J!
god save the queen the FASCIST REGIME
“As one Special Operations warfighter said during the Pentagon review [...] ‘We have a gay guy in the unit. He's big, he's mean, he kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay.’ And I think that sums up perfectly the situation," Obama said in remarks preceding the signing.
No it doesn't sum up the situation perfectly. It doesn't come close.
Obama stoops as low as anyone to make myths of righteousness for his troops, and under Obama is any better record being kept of civilian casualties? Now that Obama has approved the biggest military budget in history does that not mean a concurrent increase in dead kids? How can it not? His election seems a strange victory for equality.
Excerpt from The War You Don't See
Warning, contains footage of people of unkown colour and race trying to kill children.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymX4kr-r9ms
OK I'm going to leave this alone, it's so contentious and there are many unclear things.
like i said i'm not pro-war, just anti-discrimination... shalom.
I can't help but think that less discrimination means it's just easier for people to go to war - and therefore you have a moral contradiction. A small one, because the number of people not going into the forces because of discrimination against their sexuality will probably be a small number, but nevertheless I don't think you can have it both ways. It may be different if the armed forces played the role they are supposed to play - defenders of freedom etc. but in the modern world, and for the Western militaries, it's all about business and empire as so many of those who went to Iraq seem to realise.
I still wonder if you would feel the same if you were on the receiving end of the brutality of a gay soldier, or whether you may wish he had chosen to be a plumber instead of torturing you or killing your family. Would you be glad he had that wonderful career opportunity?
Years of constant bad news about war and current social upheavals are getting to me somewhat, I think.
Anonymous I think there's only one way to stop war, and that is to promote lasting peace by democratic means.
Why are our countries at war? How did we get here, and how do we get out? How do we prevent these conflicts from arising in the first place?
Taking on the root causes of war is much tougher than scapegoating a minority.
Keeping gays out of the military is not pacifism - it's just discrimination.
Either we are for equality, or we are not.
J when is there ever any good news about war? Just let's not blame gays (or whatever other minority) for what we're all responsible for...
No, it is pacifism. You can add a few more prejudices, keep out the non whites, keep out the gingers, keep out any religious group you care to name - all of which means less troop numbers and more sanity.
It may mean less oil for us, however.
I don't think it is set in stone that non discrimination is the highest morality, and that modern political correctness has to drive everything before it.
Try another example - women as catholic priests.
Do you really care that women are discriminated against in that context?
Would you wish for women to have a fair go at banning abortion, gay marriage, condoms? Or would you rather the church keeps it's prejudice and we have fewer troublemakers in the world?
There are over 400,000 catholic priests, would you add another 400,000 women to that just out of a sense of fairness?
BTW, I was the anon, I pressed the wrong link.
I most certainly do support the ordainment of women in whatever religious institution; and I believe if women were included it would go a long way to bringing sanity to those institutions and therefore to those who put themselves in their hands.
But I see you're in favor of discrimination under the guise of being anti-war, anti-clerical etc.
Sorry not my thing.
Discrimination by any other name still sucks my friend.
Hmm, allowing women priests may erode the church's power, it's a good point. I don't know what has happened in other churches as a precedent. I don't think it's guaranteed though, and I think you would still have just more to contend with.
Lets say you managed to get women as priests, and those women priests got together to persuade the local politician to ban gay people from marriage, or any other type of discrimination that the church encourages. How would you explain that?
I'm not promoting discrimination as a blanket philosophy, I just think that pragmatically there are more pressing matters.
I was watching interviews with Gareth Edwards the gay rugby player, explaining how he came out in the macho world of rugby. This seem to me to be a good thing, and shows a lot of character, why should he be discriminated against? No reason - but he's not dropping white phosphorous on people or slurping up taxes to do it, or following orders of lying politicians. In fact, keep all the minority folk in the military and discriminate against the straight guys, that would be even better, except my mate who was in the army said the gay guys were the best ones - but, OK, an slight increase in quality combined with a massive reduction in quantity would save an awful lot of aggro. How about that, a gay only military. I could live with that.
J you're a laugh! nice try but again, it's like saying banning gay drivers will reduce car fatalities, or criminalizing abortion will reduce abortions, or imposing the death penalty reduces crime - all manifestly untrue propositions.
I urge all the gay people of the world to be bus drivers, give up ideas of equality in the military because it's a bad career move anyway in a fundamentaly abusive environment and you would be fucking my world up.
Go into biofuel research instead and cut down on the oil and drug wars.
Increase the penalties for discrimination in these areas, engage in affirmative action programs. Go for it, I'm just not going to lose any sleep if someone's career as a hired killer is made more difficult.
Of course, if I was rescued from terrorists by a gay SAS trooper, I may change my mind about smoothing his career path.
Anyway, I've been driven by a gay bus driver. Amazingly it was just like being driven by any other bus driver. Isn't that amazing? Now you expect me to campaign against the evil gay bus drivers corrupting our society?
LOL... and don't forget the whistle blowers on Abu Ghraib and Wikileaks were soldiers.
The eternal problem of good vs. evil is in every human being no matter what color gender religion sexual orientation etc... that's why we're all equal...
Certainly I think you are right - just look at the famous Stanford and Yale experiments on obedience and power.
Philip Zimbardo says that Abu Ghraib was the result of a bad barrel rather than a few bad apples, which was the claim of the barrel makers as they try to perpetuate their control of the system by shifting the blame to the little guys down the food chain.
This is why poverty is so dangerous - when people start to get desperate it's easy to give them uniformed jobs, and after that happens they are often on a slippery slope to inhumane behaviour.
I learned something interesting from Philip Zimbardo today.
There was an unethical study on obedience that involved giving electric shocks to a puppy.
50% of the males obeyed instructions to zap the puppy, but 100% of the females shocked the puppy. At least in that environment in which the experiment was conducted the women were more obedient, which makes me wonder what would happen in the case of women priests - would it be a mitigating factor against church cruelty or would it make for a more zealous priesthood? Certainly nuns can be extremely cruel, and I have my doubts if women priests would be any better.
I can't think of any major religion that is not essentially patriarchal, but there are some examples of women rising to the top of what are normally patriarchal organizations and societies without making much difference to how it operates. Look at all the queens and empresses throughout history. Queen Victoria had come and gone before women even got the vote.
Look at Thatcher!
You could probably have the first female pope but have very little change - I could be wrong of course, but I would wager that the changes would not be very deep.
It would be an interesting experiment.
I really didn't need to know about shock the puppy J! ...were i to espouse your absurd reasoning, i would vote to ban heterosexual males from the globe, thus significantly reducing or possibly wiping out misogyny, rape, pillage, fanatic theocracies, bride burnings, female circumcision, child molestation and really annoying come-ons in bars... but i won't, because i believe in free will and equality... therefore it's not for me or for anyone to legislate any given group of human beings into submission or non-existence...
ps. I agree poverty is the root of all evil
It's OK Girlontape, I understand that lack of sex can make people loco. After all, I had religious men and women tell me sex was bad for years.
There are nice men who can help you with that, for a reasonable fee, and after that you may find your head is clearer.
Don't ask a woman priest for help with that, though, they will be no more sympathetic than the men, I assure you.
God, I'm like a saint.
So you're just a chauvinist after all.... disappointing.
Aw, come on, no fair......
Where is my chauvanism? You've made a lot of accusations that I hold opinions that I don't actually hold.
In fact you seem to be very keen to force me into some sort of stereotype cartoon right winger which I am, of course, not.
so over that male hetero self-pity.... ***yawn***
OK, well, try not to get stuck in any warzones, not that that is likely - you have people to do all that for you.
Anyway, who says I'm totally hetero?
Let us not bicker.
only a hetero would resort to the pathetic argument that getting laid might "clear my head" - thanks for the brilliant advice bro
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