I want a t-shirt that says this.
puts his butt in the air to be slithered on
**Hastur wrote:
puts his butt in the air to be slithered on**
Yee-hah!! Ride 'em cowboy! (cues Bonanza theme)
- Band name!!!11
- I don’t remember anyone getting all pissy with carrot, who Pariah Carey quoted.
- Sometimes deadpan humour works, sometimes it does not.
- Once I went to this mine and I found a shiny precious stone and it was multicoloured and I think its name started with an O. So salutations to it.
- I can’t count.
- That’s it I guess.
j_kat_251, there was an entire thread started directed at Carrot (who, it turns out, was being sarcastic or satirical or one of them non-serious things). My very post was with that jestfully in mind:)
Deadpan humor works if we know you’re being funny. One’s first post/words anywhere probably should not be that sort of thing. If for no other reason, we just don’t know.
I’m glad that idiot was banned, they fucked up the discussion of my last post, which is not about homophobes, or showers, or self-image.
Looking at that, I state that there ARE idiots who just want to keep “the faggots” out of the military, and the Religious Right DOES have a stranglehold on the current situation, but the MILITARY reason is what I have above.
Interesting point, Uncle Bill – my foster son (who was in the Marines) raised this as a fair objection to both genderically and sexual-orientationallly integrated combat groups, and it makes some sense.
But it occurs to me that any man, gay or straight, who allows his contemplation of a sexual/romantic relationship with someone else in his combat group to supersede the need to focus on the mission they are on, is someone who has no business being in combat in the first place.
The bottom line to me here is that a gay man who sincerely wants a service career, or at least a successful term of enlistment, is no more focused on his sexuality than the heterosexual man who is presumably not going to be distracted from giving cover to his squadmates by the posters in the window of the adult bookstore in the town in which they’re fighting in. People do differ, but my impression would be that the guy who is sincere in his interest in being in the military is quite capable of sublimating his sexuality, regardless of what prefix that sexuality happens to be bearing.
Wow. Even I never managed to be banned after one post…
Close, but no cigar. It is not the erection they are worried about, or the primal sexual urges, or the the CONTEMPLATION of love, but the type of personal commitment that comes when two humans love one another. The kind of commitment that sends a mother into a burning building to get her child. It is not a bad thing, but it can come into play at bad times, according to the military high mucky mucks. In combat, the fighting folks do what they do out of a non-romantic love for their bretheren, and out of a desire to get the hell out of where they are (finish the job) to get home to their loved ones. Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen are all humans first, there is generally nothing all that special about who they are, just in how they are trained.
Right. But that only means that you don’t send two people who are in love with each other into battle together as part of a larger formation – regardless of whether you’re talking hetero- or homo-love.
It’s the height of judgmentalism and of egotism to assume that every gay man is going to fall head-over-heels in love with you despite your disinterest in him as a possible partner.
I would hope that if I ever have to stand “between my loved home and the war’s desolation” that whoever is alongside me would be someone I have formed a camaraderie with enough that he will cover me and I him in any such situation. And I don’t much care whether it’s gobear or Joe Cool who is there, so long as it’s one of them or someone I can trust as much.
We agree entirely, on every one of your points. I merely wanted to explain that it is not about communal showers, or personal comfort levels, but about a unit’s combat effectiveness.
Actually, I would think you HAVE to love your brothers in arms if you’re going to do a decent job of keeping them alive. I mean, think about it…the military has created bonds that these guys celebrate together 50 years later! All of this talk about gays endangering the fight is just homophobic bullshit. I much prefer a homophobe that comes right out and says it rather than the bullshit approach the military expects us to believe.
EchoKitty, “Band of Brothers” Love is not the same as Love between a Husband and a Wife. Or between two men in Love, or two women in Love. Gays do not endanger the fight. Gay men should serve openly. Gay women should serve openly. Two humans in Love (Romantic Love, not Platonic Love) should NOT serve in the same unit in combat, as it would degrade the efficiency of the unit.
I was a training officer in a Canadian Forces reserve unit, and so the sexuality issue was that was part of my training. The short story is not too far off what I think Uncle Bill was saying: the Forces have nothing against homosexuality; “fraternization” was the problem. Of the dozen or so “couples” I RTU’d (“returned to unit”) from exercises for fraternization in the field, one was same-sex. I taught environmental indoc. (military speak for survival), and fraternization was considered dangerous behaviour. The same rules applied to all combat courses.
Righto–I’ve always thought that people who ‘fraternized’ should be booted rather than simply people who were gay (i.e. making the policy behavior based rather than ideological) b/c fraternization WILL destroy unit cohesion in a heartbeat. Unit cohesion is probably the most (along with training and equipment) determining factor in how successful an army will be during a conflict. Having said that, there have been historical instances where fraternization actually led to stronger unit cohesion (Theban Sacred Band, maybe some other Grecian units I’m not familiar with) but US society obviously has different mores than Classical Greece so I’m not sure it would work here without some major societal changes not the least of which is how gays are portrayed in the popular media.
Cerowyn, up here we have a policy of non-discrimination based on sexual orientation, so your experience might be different than that of an American.
True, LaurAnge, I think he was talking about the underlying issue of how ANY fraternization (m/m, m/f, f/f) is bad ju-ju within a combat unit. The US Military policy addresses this through exclusion/discrimination.