State-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people legitimizes the kind of anti-gay attitudes and beliefs that lead directly to anti-gay bullying at the ballot box and anti-gay bullying in schools.
I do believe this is precisely ass-backwards. Or, okay, maybe you could say that state-sanctioned discrimination is emblematic of anti-gay attitudes and beliefs, but to imply that grade-school kids are taking their cues from the military as to whether it’s okay to call each other gay as an insult, or to play “smear the queer” during recess, seems, ah, just a bit of a stretch. And conversely, the military being integrated in 1948 didn’t do much to ease bullying of black people, at the ballot box or anywhere else. I’m getting a sneaking suspicion that some people are attaching way too much significance to repealing DADT.
And once again, it amazes and saddens me to see that leftist activism, or what passes for it, is more concerned with making sure our military displays a cosmetic diversity than aggressively challenging the size and direction of it. As much as progressive bloggers love to stroke themselves for supposedly being dirty, idealistic hippies, none of them will ever bother suggesting that dramatically slashing military spending should be a priority, even if only for the quixotic fun of it, purely for the sake of starting that conversation and getting people to start thinking about it. Legitimizing it, you might say. It has to start somewhere, doesn’t it? Why not among people who incessantly complain that the media and political elite never listen to them anyway? But Chalmers Johnson, who is hardly some wild-eyed refugee from Woodstock, has a new book out, and I’ll bet you won’t see many of the top progressive blogs even so much as mention it. They’re too busy making sure that every eligible citizen gets a fair chance to be chewed up and spit out in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and whoever else we’re covertly waging black ops against.