Deportment of Defense

All right. A more considered response to Gaze-In-Da-Mil-Uh-Tarry. On the one hand I have sympathy and think it's probably worth a bit of a fight. As with gay marriage, I find the focus of the struggle, the desire to conventionalize one's own otherness in order to claim the mantle of legal equality to be troublesome, but as we are no more going to dispense with the military than dispense with marriage, institutional discrimination is bad and should be fought and defeated. That said, and on the other hand, the plainer truth of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is that it represents and clearly indicates that gays aren't fighting for the right to "defend their country," but are fighting for the right to go forth and kill foreigners in aggressive, hegemonic foreign wars, invasions, and occupations. Does anyone imagine that thousands of specialists would be getting the boot every year if we were locked in a death-struggle with a conquering foreign power? Of course, no such enemy exists, but if it did, and if its tanks were rolling toward the border, and if every able-bodied young fella were being called up to thwart the mechanized Canadian menace or what-have-you, then you can be quite sure that everyone would quite happily turn and look the other way, let what happens between sailors in the head stay between sailors in the head, if you know whuddahmean. The luxury of enforcing bans on sexual proclivities and other personal pecadilloes is really just another bit of evidence in the ever-accumulating store that demonstrates, once more, that we are not the good guys, and that the Department is not of Defense.