Wanted: Brave, patriotic American who speaks fluent Arabic and is willing to risk their life overseas. Must have an unquestioning love of country and be attracted to the opposite sex.
Lt. Dan Choi was honorably discharged from the army this week after admitting that he was gay last year on “The Rachel Maddow Show.” He is now one of the more than 12,000 people who have been discharged from the military since the rule went into effect in 1993.
At what point do our best national interests begin to trump our worst social prejudices? Choi is a West Point graduate who served as an infantry platoon leader for almost two years in Iraq. Not only has he proven that he is more than competent from a military standpoint, but his knowledge of Arab languages should make him indespinsible while our nation is at war in the middle east.
And yet we continue to care more about who people are sleeping with than we do about protecting our country and the troops who are risking their lives everyday. As the pentagon scrambles to find individuals who can speak Arabic to aid in military intelligence and interrogations, they throw away people who have dedicated their lives to the defense of our country.
I suppose the next time a soldier is killed or our country is attacked because there were not enough people around to interpret the intelligence and recognize the warnings, we can at least take solace in the fact that we don’t have any openly-homosexual individuals in the military. That should make us all sleep better tonight.
