I have been a Republican for many years. I can remember having a conversation with my parents when I was 12 and just getting interested in U.S. politics. I was raised in a household that almost never spoke on politics, so I like to think I had as close to a clean slate as possible. Being familiar with the form of government, and already having some ideas about the best way to run such an entity, I queried my parents on various issues concerning the power of state and federal government, economics and the military. It turned out that I was a Republican, much to the chagrin of my extended family, which (and I did not know this at the time) was largely Democrat.
It didn’t really matter to me, though, and thankfully it did not matter to my family either. As long as I can muster an adequate argument for my ideas, my family has always at least listened to my thoughts and offered their own.
Soon after declaring my political allegiance I ran into a major stumbling block. It was only after I began to follow politics that I came to understand something fundamental about the party I, to this day, call my own. While I do identify with many components of Republican philosophy, I have always disagreed with their decidedly conservative Christian social agenda. Their social policies are fundamentally backwards and I feel it is largely due to their disturbing inability to divorce their religion from public discourse.
This was made vibrantly evident by the recent Republican opposition for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. This piece of legislation, passed during the Clinton administration, was a festering sore on the face of modern America. It was clearly a discriminatory policy and actually weakened our military instead of strengthening it.
6 Comments
One error you may want to fix – Lincoln freed the slaves during the civil war.
I dont get why gays should be treated differently than other soldiers.
When one enlists or ‘signs up’ they become property of the US military and their civil rights are for all intense purposes suspended. For example those in service who commit adultry can be discharged.
Should this also be suspended? Are we not offending those who happen to believe they have the right to have relations with others spouses?
So why should soldiers with a niche sexual preference be singled out based on that preference. I thought the goal of the military was to keep us safe not cater to or coddle special classes of soldier.
Instead of dont ask dont tell it should have been called ‘you volunteered to serve so we dont give a flying f#%k and we dont want to hear about it – we own you.’
What role did bill clinton play in this policy?
By the way the Pentagon will have the last say on this issue.
God Bless the US military.
Thanks for spotting the error. That’s what I get for not spending enough time rereading my work.
I think it is strange that anyone would be discharged for adultery, but I hardly see how it is a comparison with homosexuality. Homosexuality is not a social contract like marriage. Adultery violates a rule of moral behavior in that contract, and (if gay marriage were legal) I would imagine that hetero and homosexual cases of adultery would be treated the same way. None of the rules of conduct need necessarily change. But it is intrinsically unfair for someone to be disqualified from military service if their record is clean, simply on a basis of their sexual orientation. One can be gay and serve with the same distinction and moral behavior (according to the military rules) as a straight person.
Clinton actually promised to repeal the ban on gays in the military during his 1992 campaign, but Congress beat him to the punch by adding gay ban language to the 1994 National Defense Authorization Act. This language parroted a 1982 ban on homosexuals in the military.
It is worthwhile to note that Congress at this time was dominated by the DNC, so it just goes to show that having the legislature on your side never guarantees victory.
Since Clinton decided to not make good on his campaign promise to let gays serve openly into the military he issued a Defense Directive 1304.26 which was called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” – which we know as DADT, or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. This compromise allowed gays to serve, provided they remain closeted.
I feel it was a cowardly move on Clinton’s part, but Slick Willy was always more of a huckster politician than a real leader. He knew there was public sentiment against allowing homosexuals to openly serve and his own party appeared to be against him on the matter.
So he reneged on his campaign promise – but hey, that’s politics, right!?
By the way, I am not sure what you mean by the Pentagon will have the last say. The military is bound by the laws the government of the United States passes. Everyone in the service that I’ve heard on tv and radio has pretty much said that whatever the law is, they will enforce it.
The issue is whether the military has the right to determine what behavior whether it be adultry (yes the military dicharges adulterers) or being ‘openly’ gay (really like in the 230+ history of the military there werent any gays until the 1990’s?) is detrimental to the protection of this country.
And yes the Pentagon can say no – if anyone over there still has a pair – in determining if the repeal of dont ask dont tell – is detrimental to the military and protection of this country.
and if not all military adulterers who have been discharged should band together to become another niche protected class in the us military.
“The mole who allegedly gave WikiLeaks the mountains of secret documents is Pfc. Bradley Manning, Army intelligence analyst and angry gay.
We’ve heard 1 billion times about the Army translator who just wanted to serve his country, but was cashiered because of whom he loved.
I’ll see your Army translator and raise you one Bradley Manning.
According to Bradley’s online chats, he was in “an awkward place” both “emotionally and psychologically.” So in a snit, he betrayed his country by orchestrating the greatest leak of classified intelligence in U.S. history.
Isn’t that in the Army Code of Conduct? You must follow orders at all times. Exceptions will be made for servicemen in an awkward place. Now, who wants a hug? Waitress! Three more apple-tinis!”
According to The New York Times, Bradley sought “moral support” from his “self-described drag queen” boyfriend. Alas, he still felt out of sorts. So why not sell out his country?
In an online chat with a computer hacker, Bradley said he lifted the hundreds of thousands of classified documents by pretending to be listening to a CD labeled “Lady Gaga.” Then he acted as if he were singing along with her hit song “Telephone” while frantically downloading classified documents.
I’m not a military man, but I think singing along to Lady Gaga would constitute “telling” under “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Do you have to actually wear a dress to be captured by the Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” dragnet?
What constitutes being “openly” gay now? Bringing a spice rack to basic training? Attending morning drills decked out as a Cher impersonator? Following Anderson Cooper on Twitter?…………”
more at : BRADLEY MANNING: POSTER BOY FOR ‘DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL’
(http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=399)
Dear Mr. Roe–
Your article is horribly bias. While you are factually right regarding the civil rights deeds of Republicans like Lincoln, you need to clarify for your readers that at the time, Republicans were liberal and Democrats conservative. This is a common error in the tea party and one that continues to make the rest of the country mock them as idiots. To defend themselves from being called racists, they will commonly point out that Lincoln was a Republican. True, but he was also liberal, which the tea party appears to view as the equivalent of an anti-christ.
You say Democrats were all southern white. Now does it make sense this would be the party to go on and elect the first black president with such a foreign name? Of course not.
Republicans were once the urban liberals who Palin calls “elites.” These liberal urban “elites” led by Lincoln took it upon themselves to end slavery, which was not very popular among the south’s conservative democrats. They didn’t like being called immoral and bigots for having slaves and thought it rather “elitist” that urban liberals would dictate their lives (the anti-government/anti-elitist rhetoric was alive and well even in the 1860s). Then came LBJ the democrat who passed Civil Rights, accepting that he had lost the south forever and forcing southern conservatives to switch republican, while the middle class, poor, minorities and the educated urban class who sympathized with them switched democrat.
When speaking historically, its much more factual to use liberals and conservatives instead of identifying by party, as the fundamental core belief systems of these parties changed so dramatically.
Thus Mr. Roe…I believe you should feel obligated to note that that it was liberals who freed slaves, passed civil rights and have been behind every great social change in our nation’s history. The last piece of broad social legislation that conservatives were behind was prohibition. And that didn’t go far.
“It’s peculiar that liberals would consider themselves poor articulators inasmuch as they are indisputably the best speakers in politics. The Democrats have deftly managed to distance themselves from inarguable historical facts that, if widely believed, would deter entire groups of people from ever pulling the lever for Democrat candidates ever again.
For example, the Democrats are so gifted in the realm of articulation that they have managed to wipe away an entire history of their inextricable relationship with the Klu Klux Klan. Even though the KKK was created to function exclusively as the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party prohibiting blacks from voting for antislavery Republicans, through very clever revisionist history, liberals wrote off that entire phenomenon with this great talking point: “The parties switched places. What was once the Democratic Party is now the Republican Party, and what was once the Republican Party is now the Democratic Party.”
What this talking point fails to explain, however, is why the former KKK member Robert Byrd was not notified about this massive party change and sat for over fifty years in the Senate as a member of the Democratic Party. Surely, after fifty years, someone could have tapped him on his shoulder and told him he was sitting on the wrong side!
This is a behemoth lie that liberals have forcefully repeated so often that it has now become accepted political reality — and invertebrate Republicans have noiselessly sat with foolish deference and allowed it to become political wisdom.
Similarly, left-wingers routinely marginalize Reagan as an economic right-wing extremist for doing nothing less than enacting capitalistic policies that engendered a massive economic boom, while genuflecting before Clinton for enacting similar policies under the duress of a apoplectic country and a Republican majority Congress.
Although it is true that the Clinton era did see economic prosperity, it was Clinton’s incredibly far-left politics that caused an angry Republican insurgency in the 1994 elections, with the Republicans taking back both the House and Senate, rendering Clinton’s liberal ideas feckless, making him the titular head of the country who merely signed bills Newt Gingrich put on his desk.
It was Gingrich’s 104th Congress that created the Contract with America, which spurred the economic prosperity that Democrats took sole credit for, an act which Republicans happily allowed. To this day, Clinton is credited for the economic growth that happened during the ’90s, yet we hear very little about his failed attempt at nationalizing health care under the auspices of his beloved wife, Hillary.
Democrats have a long history of being able to create wholly fictitious narratives and to glibly explain their way out of seemingly inescapable historical tight spots — all while claiming absolute credit for successful policies that they were demonstrably incidental in implementing. With the media in their pocket, Hollywood in their corner, and prestigious colleges functioning as brazen citadels of liberal thought, Democrats have mobilized an entire propaganda machine that makes the dissemination of their talking points painlessly easy.”
“The Democrats Latest Talking Point” americanthinker.com
To liberals the truth is a conspiracy theory.