Catch 22 much?

Ugh.

"allowing an openly gay presence in ranks will be very difficult until we have committed leadership for it. I certainly had trouble figuring out how to provide such leadership in 1993. While I believed all people are created equal, I did not believe such equality extended to all ideas or all cultures. And since I didn’t know how to advocate the assimilation of this particular form of diversity, I saw no way to prevent it from undermining unit cohesion."

Ie, we can't have gays in the military until we have committed leadership for it. And we don't have leadership for it because people like me don't want to commit to it. Why? Like I said, because we can't have gays in the military until we have committed leadership for it. Get it?

"But it would be a serious mistake to imagine that personal performance is what matters in combat. Combat is not a contest between individuals, like poker or tennis; it is a team event whose success depends on group cooperation and morale. So the behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups. The issue is whether and how the presence of openly declared homosexuals in the ranks affects the solidarity of the unit.

We have already seen the fault lines form in the current debate: the individual service chiefs have expressed reservations about Admiral Mullen’s views. This lack of cohesion will likely make the Joint Chiefs less effective in the latest round of this debate."

Ie, just talking about this makes us less cohesive, and because cohesion is the end all be all in the military, it shouldn't happen, because it would make us less cohesive.

Seriously, enough bull shit. Sometimes I wonder, do these people realize that they are living on our buck? Really, you can't get behind ending DADT because you don't know how to embrace gays? Well you're a public servant and if we decide you should do something then you get in line and make it work.

That we should be obsessing so much about what the "military leaders" think about this is nauseating. Who the fuck are they? What the hell is all this crap about the military being different. Yea unit cohesion is very important in combat, sure. But so is cohesion everywhere else. In sports. In corporations. In schools. And you know what? People in every facet of life seemed to have figured out how to live around gays just fine.

Surely, in most situations we don't make life-or-death decisions .. but then if someone is willing to allow something random like sexual orientation to come between them and another soldier who is gay .. maybe the culprit is not the gay guy but rather the assholes who can't get over themselves. And instead of waiting around for these assholes to either die out or grow a brain, maybe we should just tell them to get with program or go home. I'm sure a lot of them would very quickly be just fine around gays.