No. Don’t ask, don’t tell was passed by Congress, and an executive order can’t be issued that violates the law. Before the Don’t Ask law was passed, the President would have been able to.
I am all for female presidents, but I hope we don’t have O Fortuna Rice run for prez. Why? Because she’s unmarried. We can’t have a president who goes out on dates. 
What I would really hate to see is the welcoming of gays/lesbians while we’re at war, followed by a mass dismissal after peace breaks out. There is historical precedent for various not-liked groups being encouraged to sign on when warm bodies/cannon fodder is needed then disposed of when no longer so essential.
Maybe his Lieutenant’s not using enough astroglide.
The award is a purple heart.
Cheney has said several times that he’ll never run for President. And if he did his daughter would be a way bigger issue than this could be.
Cheney made a good funny last week. At some speech, he categorically refused to run for President in 2008. But he did volunteer to lead the Republican search committee for their 2008 presidental candidate…
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well. Though not impossible, I do think it would still be pretty difficult to go backwards on this.
Quite possibly. Particularly if Bush let in people who openly admitted they were homosexuals, a later president would have trouble drumming them out. Of course, Bush isn’t so crazy as to do such a thing.
Ewwww…no, I’m not a Republican. I just think that a Cheney candidacy is completely out of the question and would be a net increase in general pain because I’d have to go through an entire campaign season with Smugly Lizardlips out front and center all over the place…
Yessir, this one’s a real coin tosser. On one hand you have rights natural dislike for the homosexual. On the other you have their love for patriotism and their need for warm bodies in Iraq.
What the heck. I’ll be optimistic and think that this has a chance of passing. Now is not a good time to be turning away willing soldiers. I think that those in favor of it’s passing can make a really effective push.
But…but…if we start letting them risk their lives for their country, we may feel obligated to let them marry who they want…
And given that gay marriage is hugely unpopular in the US (in Michigan where I live, a constitutional amandment banning it passed easily because of fear of activist judges), I can see this why the logic above would be good reason for many to oppose gays in the miltary.
I suspect the biggest issue the DoD will encounter when (yes when it’ll happen eventually) gays and lesbians are allowed to serve openly will be the status of their partners? Will they be given the same benifits as military spouses? Will the military even recognize them as next of kin? There are issues like housing, pensions, etc that will need to be addressed. Or what if a gay/lesbian soldier doesn’t come home and gets a posthumous, will his/her partner be allowed to stand in during the presentation ceremony?
Well, the Defense of Marriage Act says that the Federal government may not recognize same sex spouses, so no, unless that law is changed as well. And seeing how DOMA was passed by a pretty wide bipartisan margin, we’re likely looking at no less than another decade before there might be the political will to change or repeal DOMA.
Let’s say “civil unions” get passed, and then a gay person dies heroically serving his country, I can easily see a ground swelling either overcoming reluctance to use the term, marriage, or inclusive language allowing soldiers partners to reap benefits of being married to a solider. Of course, with public opinion the way it is, such a scenario would probably take only a slightly shorter time then the Ravenman’s projected timeline of a decade, so…
Just my 2….
Just where the **¢۩۞₤∏™£ΔΏ ** is the symbol for cents?
Silly! Discussions about homophobia NEVER make cents…
OK, now that the gays in the military issue is about to be settled (hopefully), what about the transgendered? The final frontier.
That happens anyway. In both WWII and Vietnam, the military sort of turned a blind eye to homosexuality, only to crack down on it when the war ended.
I doubt that’ll happen for quite a while, honestly. There’s still more of a stigma about transgenderism than there is homosexuality, there are fewer transgendered people than homosexuals, and the transgendered don’t have an effecive lobby (while the gay rights groups do, supposedly, lobby for transgendered rights, they don’t really focus on them, or do an effective job).
And the Korean war. Think of Klinger from MAS*H. The real problem today is that homosexuality doesn’t have the huge stigma it did back then. If the draft were reinstated today, we’d find half the young men in the country were gay. 