If you noticed you were breathing a little easier today it might be because you took the mitten out of your mouth, or it might be because as of yesterday, gay men and women were no longer excluded from service in the American military.  Of course, if you’re like me, you know the ban on gays in the armed services was never about making anyone safe and more about making sure society never forgot that gay people were different, less, and therefore eligible for special, shitty, treatment.   

In 1993 President Clinton swept Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into a military which for generations had operated under a “no gays” policy which while harsh, was considerably less offensive because it wasn’t a transparent attempt to come through on a campaign promise while not really changing anything. Clinton’s revolutionary policy simply codified the original position, but in a way that said America would welcome anyone’s sacrifice, including dudes who like dudes, as long as they pretended to be straight, and refrained from “speaking about homosexual relationships, including marriages or other familiar attributes”.  

I’ve obviously never been in the military so can’t speak for its members, but I tend to think the people who are the ones getting shot at and having to spend years living in Qatar while their infant children are learning to walk, don’t hold much against the people sharing the experience with them. It’s always seemed the government disrespected the entire institution by formalizing discrimination in its ranks, and by assuming that its members were too stupid, or bigoted, to function normally in a diverse environment.

For years the stock argument against ending the policy was that repeal would somehow immediately endanger the “men and women on the field of battle”.  The military has, give or take, a zillion members, and even though we’ve recently asked a half zillion of them to participate in questionable wars in places that are not very pretty, roughly a half zillion remain, doing all kinds of normal, non gun-shooting jobs in places like Alabama, Virginia, and Indiana, and other places where we should be happy anyone is willing to live. Arguing that banning gays from military service because one of them might endanger a straight guy by asking for his phone numbers while the straight guy is trying to avoid rocket propelled grenade is the logical equivalent of banning girlfriends because one might be crazy and keep calling you after you’ve made it clear you’re no longer dating.

The extreme delay in getting rid of the policy is thanks in large part to the pathetic attempt to attack the policy by liberal members of congress who spent the better part of 20 years putting the issue on the back burner.  The best liberals were willing to do in recent years was to sell some jive about how the ban on Gays harmed the military because it took linguists away from the armed services, who needed them more than ever and then some other crap about the military being the great equalizer.  The best liberals were willing to do was repeal the ban as long as they could do it by typecasting all gays as limp-wristed pansies who weren’t capable of doing heavy lifting.  This type of rank political cowardice is on par with supporting the integration of Major League Baseball to increase the amount of rap music and diamond earrings in dugouts. 

In an odd way, the staunchest opponents of the repeal have done The Gays the biggest favor in this whole thing by being unafraid to wear their bigotry on their sleeve and to oppose the repeal because they dislike gays and didn’t want to give traction to the Gay Agenda which I'm pretty sure they think would somehow be a victory for terrorists and socialism.  I’m not sure which is scarier; that in 2010 there are holders of high office happy to discriminate on the record, or that those fighting for equality wait for public opinion to shift before doing anything and even then, package their appeal for fairness wrapped in pile of half-assed Pentagon studies and moderately offensive stereotypes.  

If I were gay I’d probably thank my congressman for voting for repeal, but not before I finished styling my hair, listening to Lady GaGa and Streisand, and making supportive phone calls to my female friends.