" could easily repeat and reverberate throughout the U.S. Armed Forces when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is finally repealed.
You mean he’s gay? My God! The United States is probably totally defenseless.
This week, the Pentagon set out to ask those defending the United States how they would feel to know that the country was totally defenseless. On Wednesday, they began emailing a survey, which contains more than 100 questions seeking views on the impact of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, to around 400,000 active duty and reserve troops.
The survey was evidently approved (in theory, anyway, if not question-by-question) by Sec. Robert Gates and President Barack Obama. Almost immediately, a few concerns have surfaced in light of the survey.
One of those: service men, no matter how thankful we are to them for their service, have never been a dependable compass when it comes to the implementation of policy. As one expert put it on CNN yesterday, those in the military were at first resistant to blacks and women serving on the frontlines, too.
On top of that, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which supports gays and lesbians serving openly, released a statement say that it cannot recommend that lesbian, gay, or bisexual service members fill out the survey – not that it recommended LGB (gonna leave transgender out of this one for hopefully obvious reasons) service members do not fill in hte blanks, but that the organization just couldn’t get behind something that might out gays or lesbians…even though the entire point of the organization is for gays and lesbians to be able to serve openly in the military. Sigh...
"There is no guarantee of privacy and (the Pentagon) has not agreed to provide immunity to service members whose privacy may be inadvertently violated or who inadvertently outs himself or herself," said Aubrey Sarvis, the group's executive director. "If a service member still wishes to participate, he or she should only do so in a manner that does not reveal sexual orientation."
If you’re a member of the military, don’t listen to either of the aforementioned reasons. Fill out the survey. Here’s why: you know Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is an absurd policy, and your answers don’t matter anyway. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will be repealed. This survey is the government’s way of placating critics, pretending to take your opinion under consideration simply so that they can later say they did. It’s like asking if you’d appreciate a blow job from Lara Logan; the answer is yes (unless you’re gay, then maybe Anderson Cooper), but that doesn’t mean that that answer won’t meet the e-shredder the moment it leaves your outbox.
As for the actual questions, the Pentagon is keeping the survey secret for now, but Military Times reviewed a draft copy: "[I]f the draft version is any guide, the general tone of the survey questions – developed by the independent research group Westat in cooperation with the Pentagon – leans toward the potential impact that repealing "don't ask, don't tell" might have on unit performance."
With that in mind, here are some possible sample questions for those who did not get the survey to consider:
How do you think morale would be affected were openly gay people to serve in the military?
How would readiness and willingness of troops be affected if their commander is thought to be gay or lesbian?
How would the repeal affect your spouse's, family's or "significant other's" attitude toward your continued military service?
Do you like cock?
Are you comfortable sharing a room, showering, etc. in warzones with someone who might be gay or lesbian?
Ironically, the major behavior change in male soldiers might be attenuation of gayness in the rooms and showers in warzones. They might stop grabbing each other’s asses and balls and calling each other faggot.
Or (shrug) that won’t stop and if that’s the case, if the law is repealed and men on the frontlines continue their usual homosexual/anti-homosexual antics (which are clearly posturing mechanisms to display their toughness), we just might find ourselves in the best possible situation: we are forced to be bone-core honest.
Gays and lesbians in the military would be required to continue to wear the warzone-thick skin they should wear in a freaking warzone anyway, and non-gay and lesbians would lose the pejorative; the same anti-gay comment they would have made with malice ten years ago, would not convey the same spite in an openly gay unit. Were they to make that comment in an openly gay military warzone with openly gay comrades (as I hope they would), morale would not be shattered, feelings would not be hurt, dissention would not descend. Quite the opposite. That kind of honesty and kidding would enmesh our men and women (psychologically, not physically), making them better friends, better soldiers, and a better team.
Maybe, in the end, everyone in the military would become gay. Wouldn’t that be nice. Ignatius thinks so: "The power-crazed leaders of the world would certainly be surprised to find that their military leaders and troops were only masquerading sodomites who were only too eager to meet the masquerading sodomite armies of other nations in order to have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps."
Attan lessons, here I come!
