No nation can claim to be sufficiently civilized if all its citizens* don't have an equal right to die for their country, so let's congratulate American gays and lesbians for getting to join the club. But, good lord, could there maybe be a little more joy and a little less pouty whining?
But the nagging question for some is what impact will the repeal have on other issues, such as the push for same-sex marriage?
George Chauncey, a Yale University professor who studies gay and lesbian history, tells The Washington Post that he understands the celebratory feelings of some but notes it took 17 years to overturn "don't ask, don't tell."
"That's not a sign of gay political power but of continuing gay political weakness," Chauncey told The Post.
A whole 17 years? Oh, the humanity! Women struggled to be treated equally to men for, oh, all of human history and didn't start gaining traction until roughly the end of World War II. It was a few centuries from the slave ships to the end of Jim Crow and the beginning of civil rights movement. And don't forget that DADT was seem at the time as an improvement over the existing system, which required gays, telling or not, to be summarilty tossed out of the military.
I know this is the perspective of a privileged white guy, but the change in attitudes about gays has been one of the -- any maybe the -- most remarkable sociological even of my lifetime. In just over 40 years -- if you count the start of the gay rights cause as the Stonewall riots of 1969 -- gays have gone from pariah to so near equality that the only question about gay marriage is when, not if.
*And I do mean all citizens. In case you hadn't noticed, we sort of skipped over the debate about women in combat. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, there's no real difference between the "bombatrole" of make soldiers and the "non-combat role" of women. There may still be a few people who think this a great, unresolved issue that we have to work out, but it's really not.
