How do countries manage with gays and lesbians in the military?

02/09/2010 by JR Russell

Just fine, actually.

I was reading about all the teabaggers and their leader, Sarah Palin, and how they all think it’s not the right time for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to be repealed.

Not the right time. It sounds so innocuous.

Sure — they’ll get around to it later. Definitely.

But no, for these people, it will never be the right time. The forward march of equality scares the Shine, beJesus, Shine out of them.

The fallacy that they need time to sort stuff out is making the rounds. At the hearing “at least a year” was the cry. If they say it often enough, we might just buy it.

Curious, I asked some Canadian Forces members what they thought of how gays and lesbians were in the military. I had questions about them serving in countries, like, say, Uganda (I can’t go a day without mentioning it!) where homosexuality is illegal. Maybe, I thought, that was part of what needed sorting out. Turns out the answer is pretty damn sensible.

Didn’t see that coming, did you?

You see, while you’re away working with the military, you are not permitted to have sex anyway. So it doesn’t matter if your sexual preference runs to men, women or goldfish, you are not allowed to have sex. So, actually, your sexual orientation is about as irrelevant as it ever could be.

Back at base, things are a bit different. They might have to allow same-sex couples to live in homes together on base. I’m not really sure how much “implementation” has to go into this.

Well, apparently — plenty. Whether it is needed or not.

When Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was introduced in 1993, a report was commissioned that concluded:

Military officials in all four countries said that the presence of homosexuals in the military is not an issue and has not created problems in the functioning of military units.

So 17 years later, they’re going to do another study of the 25 countries that have no issue with this whatsoever and spend a lot of time discussing how much of a non-issue this whole thing really is.

Now I’m not American, nor do I live in the United States. You may ask why I care? Because being closeted sucks ass, and people being asked to go to (often ridiculous) wars shouldn’t also have to suffer the indignity of the pronoun game.

But you have some hope. There’s that Senator Gillibrand. I don’t know a lot about her but her idea of cutting funding to DADT investigations is a cracking one. Gets the ball rolling, makes life a little bit better for the brave people you Americans make such a fuss over, unless they’re gay, and then it’s a different kind of fuss.

“As military and political leaders anticipate the end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ the lessons from the twenty-five foreign forces that allow open gay service are instructive,” stated Dr. Aaron Belkin, Director of the Palm Center.

For those of you that like to skip ahead, I’ll let you in on how this finishes. Very little changes, except that gay and lesbian service members can be who they really are, stop playing the pronoun game, have long-term relationships and live on base. Other than that? You’ll probably have to discipline some homophobic dicks who can’t adjust at first, but their lack of opposable thumbs was probably an issue anyway.