Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

DADT Repeal Imminent!

By

(From LiL.)

Or as good as – the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been forwarded past the filibuster threat in the Senate by a 63-33 vote, pretty much assuring its passage.

This is a long time coming – the nation, and the military, has been ready for this for a long time. Now, we can finally allow gays to openly serve as they do in many other countries. Gays and lesbians have been on the front lines in war, risking their lives for their country. And now they will not be thrown out for being who they are.

Congrats to the activists who fought so hard for this. It is a victory that took too long, but it is a victory.

Though he’s wrong on almost every other issue, kudos on this to Senator Scott Brown for voting for our gay servicemen and women. (Note: I can’t find the role call but at 63 votes to pass, mathematically he has to be one of the yes votes.) Also kudos to Sen. John Kerry, who fought for this for a long time.

Please share widely!
fb-share-icon
Tweet
0

Comments

    • I called his office before the last vote and was told he was on board – no caveats, exceptions etc.  I even confirmed that he would cast any procedural votes necessary to produce this result.  The next day he voted no and when I called the office to complain all I was told is that such was the statement his staff had at the time.  As for Kerry I believe he voted against DADT the first time around and was in favor of repeal as of his 2004 presidential campaign.

    • As to what Kerry is currently fighting for – he is leading the fight to ratify the New Start treaty – and has spent hours on hearings and working with his peers. This last week, he has been the one to counter a disingenuous poison pill amendment by McCain and Barasso.

      <

      p>CSPAN 2 carried the debates, where Kerry was articulate, knowledgeable and persuasive. Here is CSPAN – select any day from Wednesday to today – then Senate — and you would see the by far superior MA Senator. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/con…  (I could give you links to Brown on the floor — but they are a bit of an embarrassment. Let’s just say that I have never heard Kerry in the middle of a speech say that he needed to catch his breath.

      <

      p>As to what Brown was fighting for there – are you proud he joined the Republicans to stop everything until tax cuts for those making over $250,000 were extended? Was this worth stopping help for firemen whose health was destroyed by what they breathed at ground zero after 911?

        • staffer told him what to do. It seems odd that on nearly any subject before it is voted, the Boston Globe has a comment from his spokesperson that he is reading the bill and will make a decision.

          <

          p>I can see they want to create the image that he is both independent and that he reads the bills (even if he never seems to speak of any in any detail)

  3. Kudos to the 63 Senators who voted to break the filibuster, and kudos as well to none other than Joe Lieberman, who at least on this issue was very good.

    <

    p>There are few issues where public opinion has turned as rapidly as the rights of gay and lesbian Americans, when we consider where things were in the 1980s and much of the 90s. There’s a way to go, but this is another hurdle overcome.

  4. The Republicans do not appear to be using every last procedural maneuver to delay final action on DADT repeal. Nothing is certain until after it happens.

  5. This is the way thorny social issues should be decided: legislatively, not judicially.

    <

    p>I believe this gives greater legitimacy — much greater — to the removal of DADT than if a judge were to have decided it.  

    • It’s good to hear that you’re joining the critics of the recent district court’s decision on health care. That’s another thorny social and political issue that should be decided legislatively, not judicially.

    • Was integration in the armed services handled legislatively?  Doing this legislatively just invites repeal while a legal ruling can have weight beyond the current makeup of the legislature.  

      • Truman showed spine that Clinton didn’t have and issued an executive order, and he didn’t commission a study of whether soldiers would be comfortable with it before making up his mind.

        • I do not believe that there was a statute that prevented Truman from issuing his order.

          <

          p>Neither Clinton nor Obama could simply issue an order; the President who was comfortable disregarding the laws of the United States is back in Texas sulking about Kanye West.

          • Obama could have at least looked the other way.  Plus there is in my mind the constitutional question as to whether there is any limit to the Commander-in-Chief’s powers to give orders.  My larger point about Truman is he didn’t do a study, which wasn’t necessary here either.

        • Suffice to say I DO believe in appropriate humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, plus the National Guard performs plenty of services stateside that don’t involve violence at all.

          • There are just wars as well.  WWII comes to mind.  Don’t let your disagreement about our current missions cloud your view of the military overall.

            • The last “just war” that we fought ended sixty five years ago. The last combat veterans of that war are dying of old age.

              <

              p>We have not been at peace since then. We know, now, that our military conducted formal policies of abuse, kidnapping, and torture under orders from the Oval Office and we did nothing about it — in face, we acted to block Spanish authorities from pursuing prosecutions in the matter. A private who leaked videos of our military machine-gunning a vehicle with mother and child has been incarcerated in solitary confinement for doing so. How many Iraqi civilians has the US military murdered, sometimes for sport, and how many US military personnel have been punished?

              <

              p>I think the Judy is not the one with a clouded view of the “military overall”.

              • Just the one I assumed would get the least pushback.  As I’ve said elsewhere, some military action may have been, and I think was justified to prevent gemocides or to push back when one country invaded another.  Plus there’s also the philosophy of keeping your military strong so you don’t have to use it.  That explains a lot about how we finally prevailed in the Cold War since it did not end by engaging WWIII with the USSR.  It’s starting to sound as though some people believe we shouldn’t have a military and while I’d like world peace as much as any given Miss America we can’t just disarm.

                • The choice is not between “we shouldn’t have a military” and invading Iraq.

                  <

                  p>In addition to WWII, I’ll give you Korea as a “just war” (though in retrospect, Korea was probably an aftershock of WWII). I think we did the right thing in Serbia. I think we should have done more in Rwanda.

                  <

                  p>Think about the times American force has been used (legally or illegally, publicly and secretly) since Korea, and whether that use was appropriate.

                  <

                  p>How about our history in South and Central America? I mean our real history, not the sanitized public version. Where does Oliver North fit into your own pantheon of US military heroes? Let’s not forget the many ex-Nazis we relocated and protected for decades.

                  <

                  p>How about our history in the ME?

                  <

                  p>How about our history in SE Asia?

                  <

                  p>Let’s not forget our invasion of Grenada — do you seriously believe Grenada represented a threat to the US?

                  <

                  p>Of the two largest and longest armed conflicts since WWII/Korea, do you think it’s coincidental that each was sold to Congress and the public based on flagrant lies?

                  <

                  p>And then there are the war crimes — the murders, the “incidents” involving journalists “mistakenly” killed, the trumped-up lies about about American military “heroes” that turn out to be utter fabrications. How many such crimes do you think were actually perpetrated by active-duty US military personnel? How many have been prosecuted, never mind punished?

                  <

                  p>I agree that we have to have a military. I think that, like taxes, it’s an awkward, expensive, and dirty requirement of maintaining a free country in an imperfect world. I agree that we cannot disarm. We are in absolutely no danger of disarming.

                  <

                  p>According to President Obama, in a speech given to the UN last May, the US has 5,113 nuclear weapons.

                  <

                  p>As we focus more and more on reducing the federal deficit, and as we target military spending, I’d also like to remind us that nuclear weaponry is compellingly more cost-effective than conventional arms. Hopefully, our current misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are highlighting that reality.

                  <

                  p>I enthusiastically agree that there is an enormous need for humanitarian and peace-keeping activity throughout the world. In my view, the military is among the worst tools imaginable in advancing those vital missions.

                  <

                  p>I’m sorry, Christopher, but from where I sit your view of the military looks as though it is through a strikingly rose-colored pair of lenses. As I said earlier, I don’t think Judy or I are the ones with a “clouded” view.

                • Going through your list of various post-WWII military actions we have taken above, it looks as though I agree with you on every one of them.  I’m also glad you clarified your own position because I was pushing back on what I interpreted as an ultra-pacifistic stance.  We do need to do a better job publicizing a more unvarnished version of our history.

            • Its not another discussion, it’s a perfectly valid way to analyze this debate.

              <

              p>I’m not conceding at all that WWII was a just war, but using as an excuse to get into a cold war against communism and eventually into Vietnam, and even into a civil war in Iraq  & Afghanistan against an anti democratic  Taliban was a mistake that Robert McNamera hoped we wouldn’t get make again.

              <

              p>

        • Yes, I understand and at least in part agree with your strong anti-war stance. But “civil rights principle be damned”? I don’t get where you’re coming from with that statement.

          <

          p>Surely you would agree that a military segregated by race would be an outrage — even if you don’t like anything that the military does. I see DADT in a similar vein as the pre-Truman segregated military — it is government-imposed discrimination against an entire class of people based upon inherent characteristics completely irrelevant to their performance in their jobs. Even if that job is something you are firmly against — fighting in wars, for example — that gives the government no excuse to enage in de jure discrimination.

          <

          p>That’s why I think everybody — from the most committed pacifists to the most ardent war hawks — should be happy about the demise of DADT.

      • Paraphrased:

        <

        p>So, gays are fighting to get jobs, get married, have kids, and go to church.  They want to be Republicans!!

      • “my gay son and other gay children” is different than “my gay son and my other gay children.”

        <

        p>That said, there’s plenty of people out there with more than one gay child. At UMD, one of the guys I did theater with was an identical twin… neither were straight. I’ve known brothers who were both gay and not twins, too.

        <

        p>There is a biological component to sexual orientation, so it stands to reason that there are going to be some families out there with more gay relatives than others.

      • There have also been studies demonstrating that each male child a woman gives birth to substantively increases the odds of subsquent male children being gay.

        <

        p>So it wouldn’t be at all strange to have five sons and have the two youngest be gay, for example.

Archives