Sounds like a reasonable plan, but how do some of them miss? 
Mr. Moto is right. All y’all who are expressing shock at the US military’s ‘arcane’ policies needs to listen to him. The US military is not a normal job. You may be called on to go to a foreign country and serve however many months, and your child cannot go with you. If there is no one to care for or support that child other than you, you don’t need to be in the military in the first place.
A single parent cannot enlist in the military. If you divorce, or your spouse dies, etc. you will not neccesarily be seperated from the military so long as you have a family care plan, designating a non-military person who will agree to care for your child long or short term.
Lack of a family care plan and lack of a spouse are two entirely different things. In what way is it worse to have a family care plan without a spouse than to have one while married?
Because if you’re married you’re assumed to have this covered.
I’m not saying the military will automatically discipline you if you fall into this situation - but your chain of command will monitor it closely (assuming they’re doing their job) and if you do not have your obligations set just right, they will make sure that it doesn’t adversely affect their operational readiness.
Why this is a mystery to some people here I can’t comprehend.
Frankly, the fact that you’re married doesn’t entirely let you off the hook in this area - if you have a child or a spouse with exceptional medical needs, it affects your deployment and duty station options and might affect your advancement to a degree. None of this should be a mystery either.
Like Mr. Moto said, if you have a spouse, that’s one more person who’s there to care for the child in the event of your deployment or death. Serving in the US military is not a right. They are not beholden to allow you to join because you’re a single parent who wants to serve. The military has no interest in signing you up if you’re a liability, and a single parent is considered a liability.
I listen to OutQ in the morning every morning (it’s a gay station on Sirius) and a few months ago they had an expose’ regarding being gay in the military.
Well, one lady called in and told her story and it was pretty heart wrenching to say the least. She said that she had gone all the way through the military academy, coming out an officer and then she put in another 5 or 6 years of service. She said that she wanted to become a military investigator and she had to go through a thorough background investigation beforehand, which is to be expected for anyone. She, being gay, was worried about them finding out about her “secret” and thought that there was no way they would ever find out.
Well, they went back all the way to her high school guidance counselor and one time she admitted to her counselor that she was gay and this lady kept the files ! Naturally her commander called her into her office after this long investigation and reamed her ass out. She said that she called her stupid, dumb and every other name she could think of and then gave her two options. The options were to either quietly be kicked out of the military and lose all benefits and pension with a dishonorable discharge or possibly face a tribunal and be court marshaled and lose everything PLUS possibly go to prison. She took the former.
The whole time this lady could barely keep it together while telling this story. She lost about ten years of her life due to this. So the military takes it pretty seriously, yeah…
Honorable. The anti-DADT crowd had (and has) a big problem with the policy because of that, claiming that everyone who gets kicked out pretends to be gay to get an HD.
The US military culture as a whole is about 50 years behind. It’s not really the US in general that cares much about most of the issues that can get you kicked out of the military.
What I also got in training (I had various transient assignments with pregnant, unmarried women) was that you can’t always count on males to be around when you need them to be there – they may be deployed or deployable. So those who didn’t have family to look after the child while the mother was deployed were encouraged to separate from the military. There was also a subtext of “you’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”
Robin
A few points to make here.
First off, there is nothing “quiet” about a Dishonorable Discharge (DD). Only a general court-martial can issue a DD. Getting one is the equivalent of a felony conviction, and has to be put on employment applications, etc. Nobody accepts a DD quietly. There are many other types of discharge between the scale of honorable discharge to DD, including a general discharge [under honorable conditions], “other than honorable” (OTH) discharge, bad conduct discharge, etc.
Second, you appear to be surprised that the background investigation went as far back as a high school guidance counselor. You should realize that it has to be that way. If a background investigation could discover this, so could a foreign intelligence agent (i.e. a spy). An enemy agent could threaten to reveal her secret unless she turned over classified information. People with access to sensitive or classified information cannot have hidden secrets about themselves, and it is the job of a background investigation to discover anything like this.
During my background investigation for a Top Secret clearance when I entered the submarine force, investigators apparently interviewed high school guidance counselors, classmates, friends, etc., in multiple states where I had lived growing up. I got calls from old friends that I had lost contact with years before telling me that they had been interviewed by agents.
If memory serves, Jimmy Hendrix got himself tossed out of the Army by revealing that he was gay. I, for one, feel that this is solid proof that one chooses to be gay and can then choose not to. :rolleyes:
Go Jimmy! 
First of, it’s Jimi. 
Second, I thought he hurt his foot jumping out of airplanes and was medically separated.
Edit: Here’s what Wikipedia says:
Well, if the government wouldn’t require people to keep secrets about themselves, there wouldn’t be this problem, right? An out gay man or lesbian is way less blackmailable than a closeted one, especially a forced-to-be-closeted one.
jayjay - stop applying logic to government policy on homosexuality, it’ll just give you a headache and won’t achieve anything.
What would be the average prison term for Soldiering While Gay?
We had a Navy Corpsman in our platoon who was not openly gay but it was fairly obvious to everybody. This was between 1983-1987. He was a great guy and a good field doc. He always took care of my blistered feet after a 20 mile force march.
He was there for only about 6 months or so, I don’t know if he got booted out or not, the point is that even back then the guys didn’t care if he was gay or not. He did his job and didn’t try to grope anyone.
You’ll find that you mean Uniform Code, but I can only speak for what I’ve seen; I’m no military legal scholar. That said, it could be just what Mississippienne said here:
…since the separation did, in fact, occur while the guy was in basic training. And for the record, the prevailing attitude seemed to be “go home and take care of your kid” rather than “you sick deviant!”. Mr. Moto is right that most of the instances in which the U.S. military curtails the liberties of its people are based on the importance of getting the job done, not an old-fashioned sense of propriety. And a lot of servicemembers have legitimate concerns about letting homosexuals serve on crowded ships and boats with them. Unfair and wrong, IMO, but legitimate, in that they truly believe it would have an impact on mission readiness, regardless of their personal beliefs about homosexuality.
Yeah, it wouldn’t actually be enforced that way. Alls I’m saying is I’m pretty damn sure the possibility is there in the UCMJ.
The military provides healthcare (ETA: and other benefits) to servicemembers’ spouses and dependents, not to their domestic partners.
That’s not what a family care plan is. An FCP is a plan for who will care for your kids if you’re deployed. It’s got nothing to do with benefits. If you don’t have one, then you can’t deploy. If you can’t deploy, you shouldn’t serve.
I read a survey a while back (no cite) that said 70% of servicemembers knew someone in their unit that was gay. Most said they didn’t care. As for whether it matters, it strongly depends on the type of unit. Not because of the sophistication level of MI vs. Grunts, as has been suggested, but the different type of mission. For my MI part, I simply had to shower around the guys. If I were infantry, there’d be many many more times where I’d be naked.
People critical of this policy don’t seem to understand the difference between being in the military and working in an office building. You don’t live in the woods with your cubicle partner. You don’t change or shower next to them. You don’t sleep 3 inches from them. This is a lot of the reason why females can’t be in certain units too…not because of their physical strength/endurance, but because of what happens when you put a female in a pup tent with a guy that hasn’t seen his wife in a year.
That’s why “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is a great idea, and why we take it seriously (but not always enforce it).
I’m curious to get a soldiers perspective on this. Why do you think the policy is important to keep when so many militaries around the world allow gay soldiers to serve openly and, to my knowledge, have not had major problems?
(Something I found almost amusing, Greece bans gays from serving at all. Funny considering their history)
And? I shower/sauna with straight men at the gym all the time and have managed to successfully not attempt to molest any of them so far.
This is crap. No I’m not in the military nor have I ever been, but what you’re effectively saying is that you don’t mix steers and queers because when you do all sorts of hell is going to break loose. Why do you think this would happen? A straight man can spend all day hanging around me naked, if he’s off limits (which straight men tend to be to gay men) then nothing is going to happen.
If you’re not saying this then can you please explain yourself a bit better, because so far all I see is “gay men can’t control themselves and shouldn’t be in too close quarters with straight men for their safety”.