“Soldier Jeff Howe, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, is one of several service members “outed” this year because of online personal ads,” reports PlanetOutNetwork via Yahoo News.
Among those kicked out? “Individuals affected — nine men and one woman — include a Farsi linguist, a doctor, an intelligence analyst and a communications operator. At least three served in the Iraq war.”
MORE BELOW:
I can’t add more because my mouse is acting up, but I wanted to be sure you saw this astonishing story.
At a time we’re desperate for highly qualified people in the military, we’re ousting them because of personal ads?
Further, several of these people were “outted” by tipsters.
Speaking of odd military stories, can anyone help me figure out what the hell is going on with Phelps and his band of loonies in this story?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/kmbc/20050805/lo_kmbc/2866367
Ah, the logic of the loonies isn’t easy to decipher but their pamphlets make it clear, although also clear that they are deranged. Warning, it’s a pdf file:
LINK
Lovely group, huh?
If you have a really strong stomach, here’s the homepage:
http://www.godhatesfags.com/main/
name kind of says it all for them…twisted.
when the loonies run the institution. He is truly loony. I am sorry for his children who follow in his footsteps. I know that God feels sorry for the sorry SOB too. Can you imagine defining your life on nothing but hatred?
The worst outrage though, was when, after 9/11 Bush had gay interpreters fired even though we had so few who could interpret languages from muslim countries. Bush is another example of the loony running the institution.
Can’t someone who wants to join who is gay fight this and take it to the Courts. Soon BushCo will have to open the flood gates because they are going to have nobody to fight his illegal war.
As our dear friend Novak would say..”This is bullshit”.
but at least some lives are not being placed at risk as a result!
As long as this corrupt and power-mad administration has control of our military, I won’t be campaigning for ANY of our citizens to have a greater role in it. How can I wish for more valuable human lives to be at their disposal? I think we should all refuse service until this arrogant elite stops exploiting our precious resources for their own ends.
How right you are. Why, back in my day, men would pretend to be gay just to avoid being commandeered into the war service. It is my hope that somehow the truth will become so obvious that no one will volunteer.
Homophobic and idiotic, hey, they usually go together, policy. Stands to reason, right? But what really caught my attention was this bit:
In other words,he posted a pic that bugged his commander and so an effort was made to dig up some dirt on him? Nice, really nice.
We are NOT all in this together. Rabid, irrational personal agendas are what rule the Land of the Fear and the Home of the ‘Fraid today. The military used to have the sense to implement their “stop-loss” policies in a time of need, (ignoring sexual persuasion as a criteria for service), then reverting to business as usual, known as SNAFU, when things calmed down. Now, however, we are in a period of “rule by fever”, and it is doctrinaire and blind.
Susan, was it something you wrote?
Somewhere within the last day I was reading a piece about how the most battle-hardened spec war people, SEALs and so on, say it makes no difference to them if their compatriots are gay, that they’ve had their lives saved by gay as well as straight.
And if it doesn’t matter to them, why should it bother the armchair warriors?
But, I suppose, it’s necessary to retain the purity of the population. I can just see Bush dancing around Berchtesgar . . ., er, Crawford, proclaiming the success of the neocon policies.
Which just brought up a veeeery interesting thought, something I should have seen a while ago: Persecution of gays seems to be the new pogrom of our time. Ironic, yes?, when so very many of the neocons driving this administration are themselves Jewish. I think it’s what your neighborhood shrink might call displacement.
I didn’t see that, M., but I’d sure like to.
It’s very insidious, too, how these people are being outted .. makes me wonder if there are a few homophobes who waste hours scanning images/info in gay dating-type sites just to get someone they know.
I just looked around, trying to find it, but no luck. It was probably a diary somewhere, or a long comment within a diary. But the writer was saying that he’d been talking to some spec war types who said they had no problem with gays in the military, whatever their mostly conservative personal views were.
http://www.dailykos.com/
Armando’s front page article on Steven Vincent
reveals the Front Pagers disputing Vincent’s actual
on the ground evidence from Itaq.
In the end Steven was true to himself but
according to the wingers he was not being true
to the party.
what’s the surprise? the agenda has always been clear, and has never been based in reality.
guys caught in the “stop loss” program are emailing their buddies, asking if they can Photoshop their image into a shot from the SF Pride Parades…