It’s a shame that less than a week after something so significant and progressive made its way through The United States legislature, someone had to take the country right back to square one by other means.
U.S. Marine Commandant General James Conway told Military.com Friday that if a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is eventually successful &-&- a policy that Defense Secretary Robert Gates said should start breaking down within the next month &-&- that the Marine Corps should separate gay and straight soldiers in barracks. The military branch is the only one that houses two to a room.
“I would not ask our Marines to live with someone that’s homosexual if we can possibly avoid it,” Conway said.
What Conway failed to address is that the polite words that comprised his request do not compensate for the implicit offensiveness, discrimination and bigotry of his sentiment. In those 18 words, he already implies that Marines and homosexuals are different people and mutually exclusive parties.
If Conway’s calls are answered, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” will mean nothing. Separate housing would stand as an extension of the policy’s prejudice, only, it will be known by a different name. There are straight men and straight women serving our own armed forces, and their mutual attraction is the reason they are housed separately. Saying gay men and straight men &-&- who do not share the same mutual attraction &-&- cannot live together is implying that gay men cannot be trusted. The odds of a gay man and a straight man interfering with military morale or focus is about as likely as a straight man and another straight man disrupting the military’s functionality. And yet, the latter is common practice. The former shouldn’t be feared, either.
Continuing to ostracize members of the military who are gay will be the only detractor of morale with regard to Conway’s plans. Gay men and women voluntarily serve the military for the same reason as their heterosexual counterparts. If the armed forces make a deliberate effort to separate gay and straight men, then they are tearing apart collective confidence at the seams and insinuating that gay men and women cannot be trusted enough to deserve the same treatment as their straight peers.
Discrimination through something as seemingly harmless as living accommodations is still discrimination and is still hateful and despicable. No amount of wordplay or beating around the bush can twist the foundation of prejudice. We should not allow the scaling back of hate to be met by hate by any other name.
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