Every Marine is a Rifleman, and a Few are Fags

Progressive radio was giddy yesterday over the current President’s signing the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. From what I heard, the old Obama was back! I guess Barry’s power zone is the rhetoric of delivering “justice” to some class of victims.

I was disappointed—but not surprised—that all the chatter in Big Media and most of my blogosphere regarding DADT paid little attention to the military consequences. It was primarily a political and symbolic issue. Given my position that there simply aren’t as many gays out there as we’re led to believe, and far fewer in the military, I didn’t think this was such a big deal either way.

Only a handful of people receive a genuine benefit. And an even tinier handful present trivial risk to U.S. military capacity. If they present any threat at all.

I like the way this Marine relates his opinion that gay personnel are not a problem:

Marines achieve trust through formal and informal measures. Formally, togetherness is built through the obliteration of identity (in recruit training, we have to refer to ourselves in the third person) and mutual accountability (your team will pay for your mistakes). Informally, we achieved unit cohesion through being crass assholes…

Let me elaborate. It wasn’t us being assholes that brought us together; it was rather the attitude that if you became offended by something someone else said, the fault was with you and not the offender. This environment renders null every party’s killjoy who is often heard saying, “That’s not funny I’m/my mother/someone I’ve read about is/has cancer/black/aids/dead/ugly genitals/gay/retarded/half retarded/Asian.”

…
And in perspective, if someone in my squad wanted to spend the day talking about how they gargled dicks all weekend, that would have less effect on team erosion than half the shit I saw (like peeing on someone’s girlfriend or smashing the religious guy’s Christ relics he so tenderly put on his well-made rack). If a problem does however arise as the result of a team member getting in a relationship with another team member, or having an uncontrollable pining for another uniformed team mate, deal with that.  It’s a separate issue from there. Gay is not the problem. The problem is the problem.

DADT was a stupid policy. I am happy to see it ended. I didn’t care which way it was resolved, and hope this resolution means I get to enjoy a bit less whining from the other-sexual community.

H/T: Brian Dunbar