Dublin Core
Title
The Burden of Infallibility: Moving Beyond 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell"
Description
"Is the abolishment of “don't ask, don’t tell” last Tuesday even newsworthy at this point?"...
Creator
Wiley Robinson
Source
University of Tennessee Daily Beacon
Publisher
Knoxville, Tenn. : University of Tennessee
Date
2011-09-23
Language
English
Coverage
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Campus)
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
Is the abolishment of "don't ask, don't tell" last Tuesday even newsworthy at this point?
I"m just asking. It’s not a loaded question. I'm just trying to have a conversation, why don’t ... oh, come on. No, I'm not dismissing... no, gays’ rights are ... dude. I'm not homophobic. Some of my best friends...
Of course I think how a culture as a whole treats its homosexuals is a fair criterion for moral progress. It’s an important issue and many sociologists would be out of a job if homosexuality ever became totally uncontroversial, which itself is impossible without the improbable task of significantly changing culture or the human genome. All I'm saying is that perhaps, in this specific situation that master satirist George W. Bush and his existential Mission Accomplished banner are not— entirely— inapplicable to the issue of the gays-serving-openly'-in-the-military-debate.
Now, you may interpret that as me saying we still have a long, long way to go in the face of scattered, guerrilla opposition before we see this gay rights thing through. But what I really mean by the allusion to that silliest of aircraift-carrier-mounted banners is that DADT being considered a significant civil rights benchmark is ridiculous.
Yes, not too long ago people were all up in arms about DADT. It was a stain on free speech; a constant reminder of real oppression towards a legitimate, homogeneous social identity desperately trying to find a place in a mean, old culture. I mean, how incredibly demoralizing is institutional discrimination? However far we've come it just doesn't seem to freaking go away.
It's like people just won;t grow up and let people be people. The police were encouraged to shut down gay bars and beat or arrest patrons in all kinds of cities until late in the Cold War, i.e. recently. Hostility toward gay marriage remains a publicly asserted, viscerally held political distinction whenever the conservative lip-service really gets relevant and persuasive by showing its commitment to the universal moral principles of maintaining subjective cultural norms, generally at the expense of human rights, through intolerance and xenophobia; yet these are the behavioral norms to be expected of a political entity whose only real purpose is to freeze literally all government spending that isn't going to subsidize elite financial interests, like the guys who spend all day thinking of ways to mathematically abuse their monetary gate-keeping and de facto regulatory responsibilities. If financial firms are too big to fail, then they are by definition state-run in every way save public acknowledgement. It's not socialism if we only help those who can help themselves by manipulating other people's capital.
But other than the Republican Party and the inability to get legally married, "don't ask, don't tell" represented something more. Institutional discrimination of the highest degree: the denial of free speech of a specific minority group, punishable by dismissal.
Truly, DADT could have been as classically intolerant as segregation if the military were not already completely backwards, which ends up being the military's defense for a lot of things. For the most banally utilitarian of reasons, nobody really has complete freedom of speech in the military, and the idea behind DADT was no less utilitarian. By basically admitting to the backwards nature of its own recruitment and conditioning practices, military wisdom predicted that sexual identity was both a strong and involuntary enough social binder that asserting an identity in distinct contrast from the statistically prevailing one (straight male) was only going to cause more harm than good. Recent polling data shows that DADT was probably more of a self-fulfilling prophesy than anything, but also that outspoken intolerance in regards to non-binary sexuality is a constant, if thankfully minority, reality.
But the fact that the military by near definition suppresses personal liberties of all kinds is secondary to the foct that actually nobody has the right to kill other people for their region’s resources. Yes, al-Qaeda, a somewhat organized and extremely fundamentalist shadow organizaticm, tried once unsuccessfully and once successfully to destroy our largest building But about 99.9 percent of the folks we've killed over there are bored, economically troubled locals who find our unannounced presence a slight to their sense of territory and autonomy, distinctly not members of a clandestine terror group. Is that so hard to sympathize with? What would you do if some foreigners dropped bombs all over America and then occupied us like we were nothing? Did we not cause more instability than we created? Avenge our dead with the blood of exponentially more civilian lives like fascists? Did we not call it Operation Iraqi Freedom yet stand dumbfounded and even denounce democracy movements spontaneously erupting all over the region? We’re practically terraforming parts of Afghanistan with the 100,000+ troops that remain overseas in the areas we didn’t politically have access to play prospector before 2001.
With regard s to the military, homosexuality is a luxurious media pop-issue. The real issue continues to be America and its attack on global moral progress with thinly veiled neoimperialism.
I"m just asking. It’s not a loaded question. I'm just trying to have a conversation, why don’t ... oh, come on. No, I'm not dismissing... no, gays’ rights are ... dude. I'm not homophobic. Some of my best friends...
Of course I think how a culture as a whole treats its homosexuals is a fair criterion for moral progress. It’s an important issue and many sociologists would be out of a job if homosexuality ever became totally uncontroversial, which itself is impossible without the improbable task of significantly changing culture or the human genome. All I'm saying is that perhaps, in this specific situation that master satirist George W. Bush and his existential Mission Accomplished banner are not— entirely— inapplicable to the issue of the gays-serving-openly'-in-the-military-debate.
Now, you may interpret that as me saying we still have a long, long way to go in the face of scattered, guerrilla opposition before we see this gay rights thing through. But what I really mean by the allusion to that silliest of aircraift-carrier-mounted banners is that DADT being considered a significant civil rights benchmark is ridiculous.
Yes, not too long ago people were all up in arms about DADT. It was a stain on free speech; a constant reminder of real oppression towards a legitimate, homogeneous social identity desperately trying to find a place in a mean, old culture. I mean, how incredibly demoralizing is institutional discrimination? However far we've come it just doesn't seem to freaking go away.
It's like people just won;t grow up and let people be people. The police were encouraged to shut down gay bars and beat or arrest patrons in all kinds of cities until late in the Cold War, i.e. recently. Hostility toward gay marriage remains a publicly asserted, viscerally held political distinction whenever the conservative lip-service really gets relevant and persuasive by showing its commitment to the universal moral principles of maintaining subjective cultural norms, generally at the expense of human rights, through intolerance and xenophobia; yet these are the behavioral norms to be expected of a political entity whose only real purpose is to freeze literally all government spending that isn't going to subsidize elite financial interests, like the guys who spend all day thinking of ways to mathematically abuse their monetary gate-keeping and de facto regulatory responsibilities. If financial firms are too big to fail, then they are by definition state-run in every way save public acknowledgement. It's not socialism if we only help those who can help themselves by manipulating other people's capital.
But other than the Republican Party and the inability to get legally married, "don't ask, don't tell" represented something more. Institutional discrimination of the highest degree: the denial of free speech of a specific minority group, punishable by dismissal.
Truly, DADT could have been as classically intolerant as segregation if the military were not already completely backwards, which ends up being the military's defense for a lot of things. For the most banally utilitarian of reasons, nobody really has complete freedom of speech in the military, and the idea behind DADT was no less utilitarian. By basically admitting to the backwards nature of its own recruitment and conditioning practices, military wisdom predicted that sexual identity was both a strong and involuntary enough social binder that asserting an identity in distinct contrast from the statistically prevailing one (straight male) was only going to cause more harm than good. Recent polling data shows that DADT was probably more of a self-fulfilling prophesy than anything, but also that outspoken intolerance in regards to non-binary sexuality is a constant, if thankfully minority, reality.
But the fact that the military by near definition suppresses personal liberties of all kinds is secondary to the foct that actually nobody has the right to kill other people for their region’s resources. Yes, al-Qaeda, a somewhat organized and extremely fundamentalist shadow organizaticm, tried once unsuccessfully and once successfully to destroy our largest building But about 99.9 percent of the folks we've killed over there are bored, economically troubled locals who find our unannounced presence a slight to their sense of territory and autonomy, distinctly not members of a clandestine terror group. Is that so hard to sympathize with? What would you do if some foreigners dropped bombs all over America and then occupied us like we were nothing? Did we not cause more instability than we created? Avenge our dead with the blood of exponentially more civilian lives like fascists? Did we not call it Operation Iraqi Freedom yet stand dumbfounded and even denounce democracy movements spontaneously erupting all over the region? We’re practically terraforming parts of Afghanistan with the 100,000+ troops that remain overseas in the areas we didn’t politically have access to play prospector before 2001.
With regard s to the military, homosexuality is a luxurious media pop-issue. The real issue continues to be America and its attack on global moral progress with thinly veiled neoimperialism.
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