Judge orders lesbian reinstated to Air Force

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kenofken said:
Yes, the future of civilization itself is at stake, and it’s being threatnened by guys with nuclear ambitions and a dreams of martyrdom. Throwing our best men and women off of defense for a stupid thing like their orientation helps those who threaten civilization. It makes as much sense as publishing our satellite feed encryption codes in Waziristan.

If you really believe enforcing sexual purity is the bottom line of our national interest, we really have no argument with the Taliban. We ought to be signing surrender papers or forming a joint government.
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I take great offense at your post. I am sitting here in Afghanistan and I am seeing the damage done by the Taliban to this country .

And sorry I do not equate civil rights for African Americans to gay rights. No one can help what the color of their skin is when they are born, no one. There is considerable debate as to the cause of “same sex attraction”. We could probably have a fabulous debate on that, but that is my point there is a debate on this.
 
It is pointless to argue against the rights of gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military with anecdotal evidence and what-ifs.

Anybody who disobeys regulations should be penalized appropriately.

But, you shouldn’t bar whole categories of people from serving because of isolated incidents or speculation.

Might as well ban white males because sometimes white males in the military do stupid ****.
 
kenofken said:
I will say that many otherwise good-hearted Catholic and Christian folks believed that racial integration of the military was a harbinger of social deterioration and a violation of how God meant people to live. That’s for real, and it happened within a generation of most of us on this board. Of course we all know how that story ended. With a yawn.
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I was a young boy then, and I remember hearing WWII vets in my parish making those very complaints - not the part about how God mean man to live - but, lots about social deterioration as the natural consequence of integration.
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
:hmmm: Hmm. You could have fooled me, an Air Force veteran, with “The USAF passes out medals like McDonalds gives away toys in a Happy Meal.”

I
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It is a well known fact in the Military that the Army and Air Force are very liberal with giving out personal awards. The Navy and Marine Corps are very particular about what is given. I could go into many anectdotal stories but I will spare everyone.

Bottom line is that an Air Force Officer who has spent any significant amount of time in will have many awards and will be thusly “Highly Decorated”. I merely wanted to point out that the individual in this case was called “highly decorated”. I wanted only to show what a truly subjective statement this was. Highly decorated is being used in this case to show "how indispensable’ this person is, when in fact she is just a normal Air Force Officer who could easily be replaced in all probability. There is no shortage of Nurse Corps Officers in any of the services. :rolleyes:
 
Cubsfan said:
It is a well known fact in the Military that the Army and Air Force are very liberal with giving out personal awards. The Navy and Marine Corps are very particular about what is given. I could go into many anectdotal stories but I will spare everyone.

Bottom line is that an Air Force Officer who has spent any significant amount of time in will have many awards and will be thusly “Highly Decorated”. I merely wanted to point out that the individual in this case was called “highly decorated”. I wanted only to show what a truly subjective statement this was. Highly decorated is being used in this case to show "how indispensable’ this person is, when in fact she is just a normal Air Force Officer who could easily be replaced in all probability. There is no shortage of Nurse Corps Officers in any of the services. :rolleyes:
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I don’t know if the value of awards is over-inflated or not. It’s almost beside the point. Many gays discharged under DADT have had distinguished service records and positions in almost irreplacable professions. Others serve in more common roles and have quite average service records. No one is irreplacable, but the military has very high time and money investments in every soldier or airman. Throwing that away without good reason makes no financial or strategic sense.

Any way we read it, DADT is a program that actively and knowingly undermines our nation’s national defense, and does so for no better reason than some people’s personal and sectarian religious agendas. The fact that the damage to our readiness may be minimal rather than catastrophic in most cases is no comfort at all. I find it very difficult to believe that someone has not already died as a direct result of these policies. Who picked up the slack when they sacked all those Farsi and Urdu translatrors? What ambushes might have been avoided? What terrorist leader lived to fight another day because we were a month behind on translation? We’ll never know. If no damage was caused, it was only by pure dumb luck.

DADT is a senseless and very real threat to our national security, and its a sleazy, dishonorable way to treat those who put their lives on the line for us. There is no upside that begins to outweigh these two fact.
 
It’s inevitable DADT is repealed. It’s not necesssary, gays can serve. How gays are treated will probably depend on the unit in question. As a former 0311 in the USMC, I can tell you not many will annouce their freedom im USMC infantry units. This is not to say there aren’t any, of course there are. The culture will repress any openness of homosexuality.
 
Cubsfan said:
It is a well known fact in the Military that the Army and Air Force are very liberal with giving out personal awards. The Navy and Marine Corps are very particular about what is given. I could go into many anectdotal stories but I will spare everyone.
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I think you need to check your history; it was started by the Navy giving out awards for attending schools, serving aboard ship, going overseas, qualifying with weapons etc…; I remember walking by some navy guys each had four to five ribbons they were just out of AIT I was five years in service and I had one; a National Defense Ribbon.

That’s when the other services started handing out ribbons for training etc.
 
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