RIESZ: Don?t ask, do yell

Every couple of months, a hot button issue comes out of the woodwork. It turns our TVs and newspapers into forums for outraged advocates and their newly sworn enemies. A good way to rile people up these days &- "people" usually referring to middle-aged traditionalists and their children &- is with any sort of reference to the homosexual population.

My Thanksgiving last year was so delectable for that very reason. The fight against "don't ask don't tell" was brewing at the time, though Lady Gaga wasn't tweeting about it yet (which obviously explains why we didn't do something sooner). But gay marriage was big. So as my West Virginia-bred, God-fearing grandmother handed me the mashed potatoes, extended family all around, I decided to embrace my pesky college student attitude and open the floodgates.

I don't know why I do it; it only adds to my already-established status as a black sheep. It's "weird" to my family that I would care about the plight of others when their plight doesn't apply to my own. Here's the problem with that - if a woman was fired from her job based on her gender and every male lawyer in the country turned her case down because they "couldn't understand her plight," who knows where we'd be? In the case of women, and even more so in the case of gays, advancements haven't changed the fact that men are still making the most money. In the grand landscape of America much has changed, yet old customs remain. Another of which includes the traditional view of our military and the idea that a person's sexuality should be hushed.

In the general workforce, gays aren't viewed as a liability. This is what DADT seems to suggest, that being surrounded by so many women, a lesbian in the military would just go crazy from all of the estrogen around her and proceed to feel up all of her bunkmates. We all realize the injustice of the policy &- beyond that, I can't help but arrive at the conclusion that fear of the unknown is dominating our sexual stratosphere. But it's not my fear, and probably not yours. It's... John McCain's?

I continue to arrive at the same conclusion &amp;- our particular orientations and the ways we choose to express ourselves are all we have. In this upside down world where someone can obstruct a bill by blatantly wasting time, we can't do much but get all up in their faces. I'm ready to get obnoxious. This all calls for some serious discomfort. So the next time you're at your grandma's house, even though you adore her and her mashed potatoes, give her a little crap. Woodstock was a giant middle finger to the 1960s establishment. We all need to embrace our communal middle finger against the big shots, and even just the average citizens who can't come to grips with the times.</p>