The Liquor Talking

It’s Friday, January 29, 2010 and we join yesterday’s blog, already in progress.

Okay, okay! I hear you. Geeze, try skipping a weekly feature and I get a dozen emails and a half dozen texts demanding I put up a “Death to this Sort of Thing” this week. I’ve said it before, you are some weird people.

Fine:

We need to be clear on something. When I advocate “Death to _____,” I’m not talking about death to a person or group of people. I’m talking about death to an object, an action (or lack thereof), a trend or a way of thinking. I have a pretty short list of people who I think deserve death, such as terrorists and people who commit charity fraud. There are other types of people I’d like to see dead, but you get the idea.

This week, I say Death to the ban on homosexuals in the military.

Yeah, that’s right. You got a hard-core conservative calling for gays to be allowed to serve openly in the US military. Just like our uber-liberal Commander in Chief did Wednesday night.

It’s one of them liberty things.

One of the cornerstones of conservatism is that the rights of the individual are paramount. We’re not a democracy where the will of the simple majority is imposed/inflicted on all. It’s a damned shame that the Republican Party can see this when gay people are involved.

Okay, so let’s say Bill is gay. No, not that Bill, the other one. Right. Just by that, how are you injured? How is your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness impacted in any way by the fact that Bill is gay?

I agree. Homosexuality is a sin. How are YOU injured?

Me too. But does being offended rise to the level of injury? I’m thinking not. At least no one has been able to clearly articulate what exactly the injury is. I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I do know my way around the document and I can find nothing in there giving us a right to be free from being offended.

Racists offend me, probably more than gays. I don’t see racists being banned from military service. Without a lot of effort, I could probably come up with 20 or so things people do that I find offensive. Other than being gay, none of them preclude one from military service.

So, what exactly is the objection? I’ve heard it said that gays won’t be accepted in the military. We used to think that women wouldn’t be accepted in the military. We used to think that blacks wouldn’t be accepted. We used to think that Raiders fans wouldn’t be accepted.

Okay, I made that last one up. Point is, the military will dance where it’s told. It wouldn’t be very useful otherwise. If commanders say that gays are here to stay, then guess what? The troops will fall in line. The beauty of it is, you don’t have to accept anything. You just have to obey orders.

Oh, and please don’t roll me that tired old one about gay guys showering with a bunch of straight guys. That dog won’t hunt.

Serving in the military is a privilege, an honor and for some of us, a calling we could no more ignore than we could stop breathing. We’re withholding this from certain citizens without what I see as a good reason.

Death to that sort of thing.

Before I forget, it’s getting to be that time of year and we need to get something straight:

In other news, I’m picking up more and more spam comments and may have to shut down the comments interface. Most of the “Reader Mail” comes in that way. Some of the spam is funny:

“I am try agree with you but the essence isn’t apparent to me.”

But it’s obvious spam because it contains a link to a commercial site about eating raw food or increasing certain parts of the anatomy or losing weight. I may just put a captcha up. We’ll see if it gets much worse.

In other news, we had a visitor today:

Lynette’s granddaughter, Ava. She’s a sweetie.

In other news, this day is dragging and a glacial pace. We’re planning on hitting Doc & Eddies this evening, so tune in Monday for my take on it.

Everyone have a safe and pleasant weekend.