Florida Gov Supports Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
February 5, 2010 by James Hipps
Yes sir! Florida’s Republican Governor Charlie Crist has spoken out in favor of maintaining the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.
U.S. Senate rivals Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio both said today they oppose abolishing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy affecting gays and lesbians in the military.
The 1993 policy was intended to be a political compromise that let gay men and women serve so long as they stayed silent about their sexuality. But President Barack Obama and top military leaders say it is time to end the discrimination all together.
“We are a nation at war. The governor believes the current policy has worked, and there is no need to make changes,” Crist campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said.
Of course, as rumors of Charlie’s homosexuality has plagued him for years, maybe Crist is simply leading by example?
Florida Govenor Charlie Crist
Senate Hopeful Marco Rubio
HEY CHARLIE, IS THAT BEARD ITCHIN’ YET?
I believe sexuality is complex and at least just a little bit different for everyone. To use the Kinsey continuum model, there are many people distributed somewere between the two poles of exclusively hetero or homosexual on the ends. But due to the cultural taboo, few people express or explore their same sex attractions when they have strong opposite sex attractions. While orientation does not change, behavior can be molded, repressed, or otherwise modified to some extent. That is the purpose and effect of a taboo after all, to repress behaviors that tend to happen if the culture doesn’t forcefully prohibit and punish it. So without the stigma and social condemnations and negative consequences, more people would explore their attractions to people based on who they are as humans and less on which sex they are. Without taboos, we could also do good research and find out what the numbers really are, but people sometimes lie, so we can’t get good data consistently while the taboos remain.
And my personal belief is, that concept is at the heart of this “culture war”. Many straight people who have gay tendencies need that social taboo to keep themselves in line. Look at Ted Haggard and Larry Craig as some of many who have to immerse themselves in a social system which strongly condemns and punishes the behavior they want to suppress. They are successful only when immersed in it, but when alone, act out the feelings they have been trying so hard to repress. And that is why they will fight to keep laws which stigmatize and punish everyone who is not strictly heterosexual. They need the taboo firmly in place to keep themselves in line. Unfortunately it harms those of us who know the taboo is irrational, unnecessary, and extremely harmful.