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Obama formally ends ban on gays in military service
US President Barack Obama has formally signed off an ending to the ban on gays serving openly in the military.
President Barack Obama has finally fulfilled one of his 2008 campaign pledges by ending the ban on gays in the military which has stood for nearly a century.
The president joined Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, the joint chiefs of staff chairman, in signing a notice and sending it to Congress certifying that military readiness would not be hurt by repealing the 17-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
That means that 60 days from now the ban will be lifted.
“As commander in chief, I have always been confident that our dedicated men and women in uniform would transition to a new policy in an orderly manner that preserves unit cohesion, recruitment, retention and military effectiveness,” Obama said in a statement.
“Today's action follows extensive training of our military personnel and certification by Secretary Panetta and Admiral Mullen that our military is ready for repeal. As of September 20th, service members will no longer be forced to hide who they are in order to serve our country,” he added.
The move was expected under the repeal law Congress passed in December. Before “don't ask, don't tell,” the military did not allow gays to serve. But in 1993 former President Bill Clinton had said gays would be discharged only if their sexual orientation became known.
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GAY (acronym for Good As You) is a post Stonwall (1969) term which has connotations with fighting for rights and freedoms of an oppressed group. Gay was a preferred replacement for 'homosexual' which eminated from the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology.
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There is some evidence that military men in antiquity and modern history have been men who were sxually involved with other men but it would be anachronistic to define them as gay for the simple reason that they do not belong to the era of gay rights activism.
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Likewise, until recently, gay was a totally alien and meaningless term in many Arab/African cultures despite the fact that in these cultures men had sex with other men since the beginning of time.
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The greatest irony - mostly unknown - is that the American army was actually formed to a great extent by a homosexual Prussian General, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, who served under George Washington as inspector general and Major General of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He arrived in America with a young aide de camp who was in fact his lover. If a gay General was good enough for George Washington, why not for the rest of America's leaders too?
But of course, typically, no-one learns in school the truth about gays who have made contributions to society. In fact, the greatest General of them all, Alexander the Great, was also homosexual. His childhood friend, Hephaestion, was a General in his army and his lover throughout all Alexander's adult life; he also had a secondary lover, Bagoas, who was a Persian dancing boy. Alexander married several women, mainly for political reasons, but his true loves where Haephestion and Bagoas.
Who knew?
