An Army of One...Straight...Man

The Daily Show presents me with: things that make you go...hmmm...

It was a quite absurd interview from Jason Jones that did it this time. Jones interviewed a former military officer who was serving as an Arabic translator. The 'former' is present because he was kicked out for being gay. Openly gay, that is. He told. And we are suffering.

Although I have no actual statistics to back myself up, there seems to be a severe shortage of Arabic translators at a time when they are desperately needed (I'm obviously not the only one who believes this - click on the comic strip to the left). As Jones said (I'm paraphrasing): we'd rather be attacked by terrorists than have gays in our military.

Jones also pointed out that the military has opened their ranks to "the old, delinquent, and severely retarded," but has neglected to revise their ridiculous 'don't ask, don't tell' policy.

For the other perspective, Jones interviewed Dr. Paul Cameron, chairman of the Family Research Institute. This man was obviously chosen for his tendency to make extremely ridiculous and inflammatory remarks. However, his reasoning for dismissing gays from the military makes as much sense to me as any other.

Why else would people have a problem with gays unless they thought, like Cameron, that gay men are constantly on the prowl, distracting other men, making other men uncomfortable, all the while neglecting to get any work done. People assume that their presence will affect the environment. Cameron mentioned rape and 'intromiss'ing. Who the hell is this guy?

My point, though, is that this is all actually a realistic version of what women in the military face every day. There are many stories of male-female rape in the military. Are there ANY stories of male-male rape? If there are, I'm sure the numbers are nowhere near equal. This is the same argument people used to keep women out of the military, only swapped. STRAIGHT men were the ones constantly on the prowl, unable to control themselves. But it was women who were forced to suffer for it. If the argument stayed the same - we should keep gay men out because they harm and distract the straight-ies - then we should have no straight men in the military either.

An army of women. Interesting. But now that we only have women in the military, let's get some homosexuals in there! No one would want anything to do with the other sexually, and they can all set their minds to war and nothing but war. Mindless machines. That's what we're after, right?

I know. Now I'm getting inflammatory. I won't impose my ideas about the military without getting there through rational argument. That's for another day. Anyway, just some ideas. I'm going to go finish watching The Daily Show.