katiegrrl, why do you want to kill members of the military?
see, i want DADT to remain in place because removing it will cause increased stress on the combat units that can least afford it; which inevitably results in the loss of limb and life.
So, since you oppose my
means, you must obviously oppose my
ends, right? Ergo, you must be bigoted against veterans, and want them to suffer and die.
THAT, is the failure in logic that you are engaging in here - you are mistaking someone's
means for their
ends, and in particular you are mistaking opposition to
your means with opposition to
your ends. You want gays to serve openly because you don't want them to be discriminated against, ergo you assume anyone who disagrees with you must
want them to be discriminated against. But that no more follows than the above claim that you hate and want servicemembers to die.
You will find in debate you will do much better if you do not attempt to engage in ad hominem fallacies, or attack the motivations of those you find on the other side.
NOW, as to "picking on select groups". The military is not the business world. We are not regular government service. We are not like your job. We have a brutal task and a brutal task
master, one who kills us without mercy or hesitation if we fail, and often even when we succeed. Hence, when we hire, we don't care anything about you - other than whether or not you increase or decrease our ability to do our job with the least loss of our lives. The military "discriminates" against the very short, the very tall, the very fat, the very stupid, those with asthma, those who are color blind, those who are too young, those who are too old, and yes, those who are homosexual. None of these "discriminatory policies" are due to bigotry or hatred or anything of the like - we don't have some kind of fear of the asthmatic - they are due solely and only to our natural interest in seeing that we are able to do our dangerous job with the least loss of our own lives.
that requires a level of intimacy and cohesion in our combat units that is likely unlike any workplace you have ever known. we live together, eat together, drink together, s--t together, piss together, f--k together, bathe together, sleep together, work together, cry together, bleed together, love each other deeply, and know each other in and out. men who would abandon their marriage vows will unhesitatingly risk their lives for their fellow - because that bond is more powerful than their marriage. This is necessary to do our job. When it's 'Ski out there, lying in the open, screaming, you run to him whether or not there is fire, whether or not there are explosions, whether or not there are IED's.... because
it's Ski. I knew the body language of my squad mates better than I knew the body language of my
wife. You all holler about how it's unfair for me to compare the situation to naked pictures? sure, some of my buddies have pictures of me runnin' round with my tallywacker flapping - because that's just how it is in the grunts. you are more intimate with each other there than you have been with any other group you know, and one of the ways you do so is by joking with each other in the most intimate and offensive ways you can think of.
everyone see's everyone naked, and you will feel the totality of each others' body pressed up against you when it's cold. when you joke around, you joke around with an ease and intimacy that would never be allowed anyone else... but because you
have that level of intimacy and cohesion, nobody get's offended and everyone things it's hilarious when two guys 69 each other on the table at the armory at 0430 to demonstrate how they feel the Corps is ****ing them in the face by getting them up this early for no good purpose. It's just expected when you find out that the New Guy has the amazing ability to pull his ball-sack over a full-sized dinner plate... and you immediately force him to demonstrate this mutant power to everyone else in the platoon. Bonds are built because
there are no boundaries. remember when that video of one of those british princes came out, and it was him joking back and forth with one of his platoon mates, calling him racial names? you could tell who knew what they were talking about based on who thought that was offensive - because that's just life in the grunts, man. i can look at charles and explain how he's getting 0200 watch because he's as black as my pubic hair, and he'll have natural camouflage that way because Charles knows that A) he can abuse me right back and B) i love him, and when the **** goes down i will never, ever, ever leave him. and if he falls we will get drunk on the anniversary, and tell tales of him, and through us he will live on - and he will do the same for me. good, successful squads and platoons have their own
personalities, corporate personhoods that are made up of the multiple beating hearts of the individual pieces woven into one corporate soul. they have to have this, because only when I am able to take the pain for Ski can I help him when Jones goes down; because I know that he and Jones came in together through bootcamp... and because that is the only way that Ski can get back up the next day and go back out.
I have now lost more Marines to suicide now than I have to the enemy. It's a bitter pill. In
EVERY case they have been separated from their unit when it happened. Because when you lose the cohesion, intimacy, support, and trust in each other that you have in a good unit... many can't handle the power of the brutal taskmaster we face. Three of those losses were because of the buddies
they had lost... no one was there to dilute their pain through shared corporate personhood, and so they were overwhelmed.
introducing open homosexuals reduces that ease, reduces that intimacy, and reduces that unit cohesion. It makes us less able to function as a single body, a single heart, a single corporate soul. It makes us less able to meet that brutal task masters' demands, and the price he demands for failure is high.
and
that's why I think repealing DADT is a bad idea. not because I care one way or the other about homosexuals or homosexuality - but because I have
one iron standard that i judge
everything by: will this help or hurt the ability of those small units to function well? You could be an 85-pound blind idiot, and if you will help them to survive, I want you in; you could be Rambo and Jesus Christ rolled together, and if you hurt their ability to succeed and survive, then I want you "discriminated" against. Because I don't care if others feel equally treated, loved, affirmed by society and their fathers, or whathaveyou. I care first far-away and foremost
only about the ability of that small unit to succeed and survive; and for that they need an intimate level of unit cohesion that precludes the possibility of sexual tension.