After reading Foucault’s analysis it is his presumption that many Greek soliders were gay almost by a rule, and not by acceptance. Does this mean that we should assume that this would work in an American military? Maybe in a gay cultured small band of men who were intimate in more then one way it might work. This logic fails when we apply it to one of the largest militaries in the world in the same way that we think we could apply one military culture to another military culture. That of course depends on if one accepts that any of these studies you mention on this When a gay military has no effect on the troops I assure you the men in the military will be telling you this. Till then don’t assume that any outside data is not pressured.
a response to the following:
In my view, the strongest argument against President Obama’s proposal to allow gays to serve openly in the military is the claim that it will somehow impair unit cohesion. Yet as columnist Steve Chapman points out, several of our allies allow gays to serve openly with no such ill effects:
It’s not completely implausible that in a military environment, open homosexuality might wreak havoc on order and morale. But the striking thing about these claims is that they exist in a fact-free zone. From all the dire predictions, you would think a lifting of the ban would be an unprecedented leap into the dark, orchestrated by people who know nothing of the demands of military life.
As it happens, we now have a wealth of experience on which to evaluate the policy....
A couple of dozen countries already allow gays in uniform—including allies that have fought alongside our troops, such as Britain, Canada, and Australia. Just as there is plenty of opposition in the U.S. ranks, there was plenty of opposition when they changed their policies.
In Canada, 45 percent of service members said they would not work with gay colleagues, and a majority of British soldiers and sailors rejected the idea. There were warnings that hordes of military personnel would quit and promising youngsters would refuse to enlist.
But when the new day arrived, it turned out to be a big, fat non-event. The Canadian government reported “no effect.” The British government observed “a marked lack of reaction.” An Australian veterans group that opposed admitting gays later admitted that the services “have not had a lot of difficulty in this area.”
Israel, being small, surrounded by hostile powers, and obsessed with security, can’t afford to jeopardize its military strength for the sake of prissy ventures in political correctness. But its military not only accepts gays, it provides benefits to their same-sex partners, as it does with spouses. Has that policy sapped Israel’s military might?
The Australian, British, Canadian, and Israeli armed forces are all among the best in the world. If they allow gays to serve openly with no ill effects, that strongly suggests that the US can as well.
I have not followed the literature on this subject in detail. So it’s possible that there is a body of data somewhere showing that these nations’ military capability really has been impaired in some way by allowing gays to serve. I highly doubt it, but I lack the knowledge and expertise to be sure.
One could also argue that the US armed forces are so different from those of these other countries that their experience is irrelevant. Given the quality of these armies and the fact that all of them rely heavily on US-style weapons, organization, and military doctrine, I’m skeptical of that claim too.
It may be that US troops are much more homophobic than those of these other countries, and therefore won’t effectively serve with gays. That too seems a dubious argument. An April 2009 poll showed that 50% of survey respondents in military households support letting gays serve openly, with 43% opposed; 56% reject the view that allowing gays to serve openly would be “divisive.” That suggests that homophobia in the military is far from universal. As Chapman points out, there was no outcry by servicemembers or decline in unit cohesion when the ban on openly gay troops was temporarily lifted during the 1991 Gulf War. Attitudes towards gays are considerably more favorable today, which makes problems even less likely.
To my mind, opponents of allowing gays to serve openly in the military need to show that the ill effects they predict have actually occurred in these other countries. If they can’t, they should support the idea of allowing the armed forces to choose the best available recruits regardless of sexual orientation.
Since when has this blog become so enthusiastic about science and data that we would decide that data could not be obscured? Was Al Gore's data real science? Surely you know that a biased experiment is possible by controlling the axioms? The problem with science is one creates the testing axioms. judging merely by skill you create a bubble that ignores a correlative of the environment of the subject. Do we really know yet what the setup of the experiment you claim is? given the right setup one could say that pornography causes violence to women. That is what the feminists were saying for two decades. it was hogwash. I've gone over the studies. science works within the context of it's controls. The studies on porn were concluding as to what was angering people. The data was completely irrelevant to the study. Here is some more information on the flawed http://xrl.us/porn studies that the feminists sold to the mainstream
Given Science the progressives have pushed an agenda that is hateful of heterosexual men and spent most of the last half century pushing drugs like Ritalin on young boys who were merely different then their femme counterparts. Could this not just be more of the same Blue State hatred that has destroyed society and has led America to decline?
We idolize Asia's strong educational ethos, but seem to fear Asia's strong cultural patriarchal view of the family. Strong traditional Jewish values were patriarchal too. I'm not saying that we should turn the world upside down for anyone, but the gender revolution and the ability to create innovators seem to be running parallel. Femmes have strengths. their emotional quotient gets work in the modern world, why are we still doing this to men? more on this argument here http://xrl.us/feminists
My personal take is that, "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is a disaster. I differ with Sarah Palin who pardon my French doesn't have any balls to say the reality that sexuality in the military doesn't mix. does anyone remember Abu Gharaib? the social left condemns Abu Gharaib, but was not that a homosexual act in the military? Nothing like that ever surfaced before and photography is one hundred years old. this is mass sexual hysteria. It isn't like Gay people are financially burdened as an segment group either. It is the straight men that really need the military for financial reasons... not that affirmative action should lead decisions, but still considering the amount of meat and potatoes guys out of work, this is unfair. just because there are gay men in the military already doing well for themselves doesn't mean they are not hurting people around them. Funny the way everyone is so keen on diversity and tolerance, but you can't respect difference until you understand what different is. I love gay people. I respect them as well. I want to see them do well, but I don't want to be naked in the same shower with them. women don't want men looking at them naked, but most ladies in the Blue States are trying to force gay men into the military. It is wrong. The military is a team effort. being able to shoot a gun well is not as important as contribution to the team. No skill is as important as the team. the team gets demoralized by sexuality. In the end... it comes down to the majority of the military to decide. they are the ones to sacrifice their lives and they should be honest with what they want and what they are thinking about. Perhaps it is better to allow the military to do what was working before they became sexually confused. we used to win wars with the good old boys.
The ladies on the View said that the boys in the military want this.
I'm wondering what stat leads "The View" to the idea that the military wants this? Shouldn't they at least reference this information for the rest of us who don't have an inside track of what is going on? They just made this up and expect us to all nod our head and agree. forget the politics here and just think about what kind of shoddy information is being distributed here. it isn't just an oops moment. They just spoke for all of the armed service men. the best analysis on sexuality to this day still remains in Freud's pen because he never had the presumption to control the experiment like Gloria Steinem's friends do. He merely wrote down the experience and that is why Freud is still useful today. It is why Freud is still talked about... even when he is wrong. These people on this TV show think their "VIEW" is their opinion. Your "VIEW" starts with what you see, not how you interpret what you saw.
the APA said there is no GAY GENE. indeed there is no nature, only nurture when it comes to a person's unobjective biological activities. that means people aren't born gay according to either one of the largest if not the biggest psychological association. assuming demons based on behavior would take away the free will argument that the social left is doing anyway. social liberals and superstitious nuts have so much in common. The cultural opinion of an organization rarely has any influence on my opinion, but the depth of their study is impressive. perhaps if the gay community were more objective then midevil freaks it might help us improve their condition. as offensive as this ritual might seem it pales in how it disgusts me to see the hypocrisy of those that believe that gay men are born that way and fail to apply the standard of judgment towards everyone else. would it seem fair to many of the readers here if I were to say women are born more likely to nurture? it is fair to me, but I suppose my values aren't punitive. my take is that there are many causes that lead to a person's taste. I would rule out Demons and Gloria Steinem however and would not ask any government to set any government contracts like marriage based on such arbitrary abuse. I ask the same behavior for the military. Let the soldiers decide what they want and stop pushing one survey. There are some huge egos involved in this and they have proven in the past to not be taking accurate surveys.
Volohh continues on the next post....
I thought I’d ask again what I brought up a few years: How can the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy — or for that matter, any similar exclusion policy — be justified as to lesbians? As I understand it, the main argument in favor of such a policy for male homosexuals is that in all-male or nearly-all-male combat units the possibility of sexual tension may undermine unit effectiveness. I’m skeptical about this argument, but it at least seems plausible.
Yet that doesn’t seem to apply to lesbians, since presumably they would very rarely be serving in all-female units, and never in all-female combat units. Moreover, even if we set aside antidiscrimination arguments and focus solely on military effectiveness (which may or may not be the right approach, but let’s use it here), it seems lesbians would tend to make better soldiers than straight women:
- They are less likely to get pregnant.
- They seem less likely to get sexually transmitted diseases.
- If the stereotypes about lesbians tending to act in more masculine ways are generally accurate — hard to tell, for obvious measurement reasons, but that seems to be the conventional wisdom — then that cuts further in favor of lesbians as opposed to straight women. Many women may well make great soldiers, but if we’re speaking about generalities, and the military policy is generally defended using generalizations, I’m happy to at least tentatively assume (as I suspect would the military) that stereotypically masculine traits and attitudes tend to be more useful for soldiering than stereotypically feminine ones.
Is it just that the military fears that straight soldiers will so dislike lesbians that this itself would cause morale problems? I guess that just doesn’t strike me as that factually plausible.
Is it that the military wants to treat male and female homosexuals equally, for fairness or public relations reasons? That seems odd: Can it really be that discriminating against homosexuals is just fine, discriminating against women (as the military long has done, and still in considerable measure does) is just fine, but discriminating based on sex among homosexuals is wrong, even when there’s a perfectly sensible argument for such discrimination?
Is it that the worry is that having lesbians using communal shower facilities with other women would make the women uncomfortable, because the straight women would be worried about being ogled by the lesbians? I suppose that’s possible, but isn’t that a pretty minor concern, especially given the broad surrender of privacy that is expected in the military?
immediate note by me----> I know many women who don't like being oggled by lesbians. In the same respect I don't like gay men doing it to me in the locker room.
Or is there something else I’m missing here? By the way, an AP story published by Stars & Stripes in 2009 reports that “Women accounted for 15 percent of all active-duty and reserve members of the military but more than one-third of the 619 people discharged last year because of their sexual orientation. The disparity was particularly striking in the Air Force, where women represented 20 percent of all personnel but 61 percent of those expelled.”
REQUEST: Could you please focus the discussion in the comments on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as applied to lesbians, and set aside the unit cohesion arguments related to male homosexuals? Those unit cohesion arguments could be commented on in the comments accompanying Ilya’s “Unit Cohesion” post.
Frank Drackman says:
In my experience 99.999999999% of Female Marines were lesbians, at least thats what 99.9999999999% of the ones I hit on said...
Jon says:
I’m the executive officer of a mixed gender battalion in Iraq and have two observations; first, that lesbianism seems to be far more of an “open secret” and accepted than male homosexuality, and second, that there seem to be more instances of physical fights between lesbians than between men in the unit. This may be entirely coincidental and unrelated to DADT. I do wonder, though, if the dynamic would be different without DADT.
February 10, 2010, 4:42 pm
Noah David Simon says:
...and I would agree with some of the commenters above like Jon. Lesbians are more likely in my opinion to be Bisexual then their male counterparts.I wouldn’t want to fight with women either. Straight ones. ....and I really don’t get where you are going with this. I can’t think how many times I nearly got my ass beat down by jealous lesbians on the NYC subways because I was looking at them. Bad for morale for certain.
Honestly I would have no problem having gays in the military (just like women). In fact I think having a better communicating sex or personality would be a positive thing. The military needs the best PR in the world and if it is good for Madison Ave then it is good for the soldiers that have to sell their occupation every day.
...but the soldiers out with their guns fighting the war should be straight guys.