We must use all tactics in the war on terror....

...unless they're gay. Then they're worse than terrorists.

STORY from AP

The chairman of the Republican National Committee just got finished lambasting the Democrats because they would "surrender important tools" to the terrorists. As outlined here, he further stated:

"America faces a critical question," Mehlman said. "Will we elect leaders who recognize we're at war and want to use every tool to win it, or politicians who would surrender important tools we need to win?"

Naturally, one of the important fronts is translating Arabic. I'm pretty sure those Islamic terrorists don't go translating their messages into Swahili just to thwart our spies. Whenever we raid houses, we always seem to come up with buckets of papers and other documents. I've seen several articles detailing how our intelligence services were caught with a short supply of Arabic-speaking agents in the period after September 11th.

In light of this, it's almost laughable that we would be discharging these important people just because they're gay. It's most definitely NOT laughable that, at least in the case of one man in the above story, people seem to have skimmed the chapter on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." In this particular case, there was a whole lot of "Ask," including questions guaranteed to root out the gays, such as "do you have gay friends" or "are you involved in community theater?"

I understand the armed forces position. They're filled with mainly men. They strive for uniformity. That's why they don't like women. They want everyone to be as close to clones as you can be, because it makes a more cohesive fighting force. And if there's one thing that sets soldiers on edge, it's the idea that someone, somewhere, likes the butt sex.

The Armed Forces have a recent policy against open gays in the millitary, enacted in 1993 by President Clinton. That's not what I'm mainly mad about. I can't believe the witchhunt that's cracking down based on annoymous emails. And guess what? It's expensive. 11,000 soliders have been dismissed under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The article states that 800 of the soliders so dismissed had critical skills, such as languages. The cost to discharge them and train replacements? $369 million!

I don't know about you, but $369 million seems like a lot of money to spend to rest easy that no one in the millitary is gay. Especially since the soliders discharged probably love mom and apple pie just as much as anyone. What message are we sending when the White House tells us that global terrorism is one of the greatest threats to our way of life, but being gay is, quite frankly, EVEN WORSE.

The community-theater-participating enemy of my enemy is... well... still my enemy.