Crusing the web, I came across this story (hat tip to No Capital) about how our Military is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Or more specifically, discharging medical specialists trained to care for our wounded in a time of war because they have that dreaded “Gay” lifestyle:

Military Discharged Hundreds Of Gay Health Professionals
by Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press

Hundreds of officers and health care professionals have been discharged in the past 10 years under the Pentagon’s policy on gays, a loss that while relatively small in numbers involves troops who are expensive for the military to educate and train.

The 350 or so affected are a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million members of the uniformed services and about 3.5 percent of the more than 10,000 people discharged under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy since its inception in 1994.

But many were military school graduates or service members who went to medical school at the taxpayers’ expense -_ troops not as easily replaced by a nation at war that is struggling to fill its enlistment quotas.

Once upon a time, people used to be afraid that having transfusions of “colored blood” would be dangerous to them. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that our own military subscribed to these absurd beliefs:

On the eve of the Second World War, the Red Cross stockpiled large amounts of blood because of techniques developed by the brilliant African American scientist Dr. Charles Drew. Drew himself became director of the Red Cross’s Blood Bank in 1941, but resigned his position after the War Department ordered that the blood of Black and white donors be segregated.

Drew called the order “a stupid blunder,” but the Red Cross complied and imposed Jim Crow in the blood supply. The Red Cross even initially refused to accept the donation of blood by African Americans at the beginning of the war effort–though it was willing to accept cash donations from them. Throughout the war, the NAACP investigated complaints by Black servicemen of racist treatment by Red Cross.

The Red Cross desegregated the blood supply after the Second World War nationally, but it allowed its Southern chapters to continue segregating blood through the 1960s.

And there were countries that specifically worked to eliminate a certain group of people from practicing medicine because the powers that be decided that they were unfit to care for “normal” people:

Germany moved to eliminate the ‘Jewish influence’ from medicine by limiting their access to patients and medical school. In order to bolster claims of Aryan supremacy, the study of blood became a focus for distinguishing Aryans from Jews. The combined effects of these initiatives dealt a self-inflicted wound on the Nazi war effort. The more than 8,000 Jewish doctors barred from practice were replaced by hastily trained and inexperienced paramedics.

I wonder how many of our wounded soldiers give a damn about who cares for them, just so long as they know what they’re doing and can help. But in America, it seems, some lessons take a long time to learn. The prejudices against Jewish doctors in Germany, and the bigotted belief that African American blood was somehow unfit for use by whites, even during a period of national emergency, are thankfully prejudices that most of us have long abandoned. Maybe someday, the US Military will wise up and abandon their jihad against gays and lesbians, a policy that is both detrimental to our wounded and morally repugnant.

I won’t be holding my breath however.