Despite the fact that DADT is a Bill Clinton political brainchild from the go-along-to-get-along days of the early 1990s, the push to scrap it has mostly come from the political left, whose insistence that all homosexuals aren't necessarily shaved Chupacabra brings some sanity to one of America's fiercest debates.
Or at least that's what I thought. Turns out, though, that liberals are just as irrational as conservatives when it comes to Adam and Steve sharing a foxhole. Look upon these poll numbers and weep:
79% of Democrats support allowing gay men and women to serve openly.
43% of Democrats support allowing homosexuals to serve openly.
That is not a typo. I checked.
Sixty years after the Mattachine Society, forty-one years after the Stonewall Inn raid, thirty-three years after Anita Bryant, and seven years after Lawrence v Texas, there is a thirty-six percentage-point difference in what employment liberals think "homosexuals" should be allowed to pursue versus "gays".
Whence comes the discrepancy? We can speculate that the term "gay" elicits a much friendlier (literally) image than the taxonomic "homosexual", but doing so insinuates such an immense level of epidemic puerility that even my epic misanthropy won't abide it. In order to prevent the impending voluntary collision between my head and the nearest brick wall, I'm going with "transcription error" and calling it a day.
Shape up, folks. If anyone wants to start his own army that won't allow gays, or blacks, or Jews, or even homosexuals (!) to serve, then I'll help him pick out snazzy uniforms. The right to set up whatever backward, bigoted clubhouse that revs your engine is inviolate, but the United States Armed Forces -- a public institution -- has no more right to bar qualified homosexuals than they have to bar Catholics or Jersey Shore fans.
It's simple. About a quarter of the respondents heard "gay men and thespians", and thought, "now who would ever think the Army couldn't use a little cheer and entertainment? What a silly question!"
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