Don’t ask, don’t discriminate

I was recently complaining to my parents about how stressed out I was over a huge term paper I have to write as part of my study abroad program.

As I was going on about how it was twice as long as the longest paper I’d ever written, my mom made fun of me for complaining about my workload. Her papers had been MUCH longer, she’d written them on a typewriter, and she spent three hours every day in marching band practice, so what was I complaining about?

My dad skipped the papers and exams and went straight to the U.S. Army, where he proceeded to top us by mentioning his 6 a.m. roll call (it’s well-known in my family that I don’t do mornings).

Joining the army is tough stuff. Actually, it isn’t so much the joining as what comes after. And since my father, grandfather and two of my siblings have been in the army, I have a great respect for those who sign up.

And in this time of open warfare on two fronts, the government is pretty pleased when people join, too. So pleased, in fact, that the federal government is working on repealing “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.”

I understand that people have a problem with gays. Actually, I don’t really understand it, but I realize that for some reason, people take offense. The fact that gay marriage hasn’t been legalized in all 50 states is evidence of that. The fact that several gay students across the country recently committed suicide after being verbally abused by peers is even more sobering evidence.

However, there seems to be no rational explanation for barring gays and lesbians from the army, especially in this day and age.

After so many years of unpopular war, it seems that the army should be grateful that people keep volunteering for tours of duty. If I ran the army, I’d be happy to take any qualified person I could get, regardless of sexual orientation. The more the merrier, right?

And yet, Gen. James Amos, the new commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, is speaking out against allowing gays in the military as long as the military is fighting in Afghanistan.

“There’s risk involved,” he said, according to Politics Daily. “I’m trying to measure that risk. This is not a social thing. This is combat effectiveness.”

It gets better.

“There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women — and when you talk of infantry, we’re talking young men — laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers,” Amos said. “I don’t know what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that’s what we’re looking at. It’s unit cohesion, it’s combat effectiveness.”

Unit cohesion? Combat effectiveness? What does that have to do with a person’s sexual orientation?

Sure, the Marine Corps puts two people in a room, but just because someone’s gay doesn’t mean he or she is going to want to get with the roomie. If a straight soldier has a problem with rooming with a gay person, that’s the former’s problem, not the latter’s.

Anyone who wants to serve his or her country should be allowed to do so and not have to keep sexual orientation a secret. Doing otherwise is to allow discrimination to continue. The armed forces fight to protect this country — and this country includes homosexual as well as heterosexual people.

It’s dismaying to see that such a high-ranking officer is “assessing the risks” rather than being open to accepting all people, regardless of who they are. I’m glad that a repeal of “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” is currently working its way through the courts and through Congress. Hopefully it’ll be repealed soon, one way or another.

Because, no matter how much you sugarcoat it, barring people from serving their country on the basis of sexual orientation is discrimination, plain and simple. A few wars ago, African Americans were forced to serve in separate units from their white counterparts, and today we consider that absurd. This is no different.

It’s a shame that people — people with rank, people with position, who presumably have a great deal of intelligence to have reached that position (in the military, that is; I don’t have much hope for the politicians) — can’t see that this is wrong.

I just hope that in 50 or a hundred years — or even sooner would be nice — the majority of people will be looking back and teaching their children about “Don’t ask, Don’t tell,” and they’ll say that it was wrong.