Barack Obama invited some special friends for a first-of-its-kind, in-person White House chat today: liberal bloggers who are always mean to him! And the first report back suggests that they discussed Obama’s legislative strategy for repealing DADT. He has one!
Really? That’s the big, breaking news from this meeting of the minds? Given a chance to bend the president’s ear for a few minutes, this is the issue you would focus on? Sigh. And these are the people who, with no trace of irony or self-awareness, will turn around and boast about being Dirty Fucking Hippies.
I’ll never understand this mainstream progressive conviction that one of the best things we can do to help gay people is to make it easier to stick more of them in starchy uniforms, press a weapon into their hands, and send them off to our imperial outposts. IOZ once noted that it’s a testament to the inessential nature of much of our military activity that we can afford to discriminate at all; if we were actually in a life-or-death struggle to defend the homeland, rather than occupy someone else’s for dubious reasons, we would damn sure make vital use of anyone capable of standing up straight and uncrossing their eyes long enough to aim a rifle. Then again, given all the salacious details we keep learning from Wikileaks about the grim reality of militarily occupying a country whose inhabitants don’t want you there, maybe this push to repeal DADT is rooted in the conviction that a group of people who by and large are habitually accustomed to the necessity of discretion and circumspection would be invaluable when it comes to keeping secrets from the wider public. Come on out of the closet, all you would-be warriors, Uncle Sam needs the storage space for all these piles of Iraqi and Afghan bones!
At any rate, I make no claims to being an especially original thinker, but I was starting to feel a bit like a voice in the wilderness for my belief that while discrimination against gays is surely bad on the face of it, there might just be more important issues to consider here, a forest-and-the-trees situation, if you will. So I’m glad to see John Caruso, Radley Balko and Mr. Fish adding their voices to what should be a chorus of the obvious.