Quote:
Originally Posted by djchameleon
I remember one of my high school teachers telling us that the word fair should be removed from our vocabularies because in reality life just isn't fair and it will never be no matter how hard we try. He would also tell his sons the same thing to remove the word fair from their vocab because it pretty much doesn't exist.
Also, I read that article a bit earlier when JackPat was asking about it's implemention and sure it discharged 13,000 troops over the time that it was implemented but after 9/11 the number of discharges were dramatically decreased and you can see that over time it was almost as if the policy was slowly being phased out. The strongest branch that was discharging people because of it was the Army and that doesn't even surprise me one bit.
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I love the word fair! It is one of my favorite words, dj. Fairness *does* exist. Giving up because it can be hard to attain will solve nothing.
I've been thinking about this thread off and on during the day, trying to think of how to show by analogy how wrong and unfair I feel DADT is, even if it was an improvement over the previous outright ban of gay/bi people from the military.
The best example I could think of is segregation laws. Sure, they were an improvement over
slavery. But segregation...and the fact that people supported it for so long...is a shameful part of human history and nothing to be proud of.
Similarly, telling me that if I were to join the military I couldn't acknowledge if the love of my life were a woman, while some officer wears a wedding ring on his finger and openly talks about his wife, his family...is horribly unfair...like a negation of those closest and dearest to me. It is an attack on my "spirit." It's like saying to me, "Yes, you can join the military, but you have to use the back door, and you can't talk." Hmmm...not a pretty picture.
I'm glad if it is true that people have over time been ignoring the DADT policy. It is a bad policy that more people *should* have ignored. A government will only have power if people follow its laws. In my opinion it is sad that more people didn't stand up for fairness from the start.