...as young as we're ever going to get...

From a New York Times article about the possible repeal of the US military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy

[…] both opponents and supporters of the ban say a host of thorny practical questions will face the Pentagon if Congress gives final approval to legislation allowing the repeal of the ban, which could happen this summer.

Will openly gay service members be placed in separate housing, as the commandant of the Marine Corps has advocated? What benefits, if any, will partners or spouses of homosexual service members be accorded? Will all military units be required to treat homosexuals the same? And what training will heterosexual officers and enlisted troops receive to prepare them to serve with openly gay soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines?

The very fact that paragraphs like this have to be written either breaks my heart or makes me want to laugh in disbelief. Basic answer to all these questions? Service members will just have to grow up. With the issue of separate housing - well in American universities don’t predominately heterosexual male and female student bodies live in the same housing? If you can let heavily-drinking young college students share dorms and rooms, even when the possibility exists that these are types who could (shock horror) be attracted to those living around them, can you not let your grown service members share housing? And as to that incredible question of ‘what training will heterosexual officers and enlisted troops receive to prepare them…’ - I wasn’t aware that troops now needed specific training to prepare them to be decent human beings. How can a person ask what training they will get to learn - to be respectful, to be accepting, to be open-minded and intelligent - should that not be the sort of thing they are taught by their parents, or in their schools, long before they’re old enough to enlist? What training have gay men and women ever received to prepare them to live and work with openly homophobic peers? These priorities are so warped they make my head spin.

Elaine Donnelly, a leading supporter of the ban on homosexuals serving openly, said she expected major fights over housing issues, including whether gay couples should be allowed to live together on bases, as married heterosexual couples are. “Same-sex couples in family housing will become a reason for families to decline re-enlistment or a change in station,” she said.

Ms. Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a nonprofit policy group, also predicted fierce debate over rules governing antidiscrimination policies toward homosexuals. She said she and other supporters of the ban worried that service members who oppose homosexuality on religious grounds would be denied promotions, a policy she called “zero tolerance” toward anti-gay discrimination.

First paragraph: so the reason people will decline to re-enlist in the military is not because their families are forced to live a lifestyle that drags them round from base to base, or they have to serve long terms away from their loved-ones, or even the fact that they might get blown up, shot, etc. - but because good god there’s a gay couple living next-door? Enemy car-bombs are nothing compared to the threat of Tegan and Sarah being audible over the fence from the neighbour’s back-garden in the summer months, is that right?

And second paragraph: well I just can’t begin to fathom how a person can be critical of the idea of zero tolerance towards anti-gay discrimination. And whatpriorities again - the fact that gay men and women are discharged from the military for being openly gay (as 13,000 have indeed been since 1993) is not her concern - her concern is that, if this rule changed, people who wanted to discriminate against gay people would possibly be denied promotion. It ultimately doesn’t matter whether a person’s anti-gay discrimination is on religious grounds or not: if you want to operate within and receive the rewards of being within any supposedly-decent body, be that the military, a country, a company, then you have to sign up to be a half-decent human-being towards the other human-beings involved. The rule should not be either keep secretly gay or you’re not wanted, but either learn to live with others in a compassionate way regardless of your personal prejudices or you’re not wanted. Those are the people you want discharged from your military, surely - not those with tendencies to fall in love with the same sex, but those with tendencies to treat their other human comrades so terribly.

I give up considering anything odd anymore. It’s not even that I think my life is like The Truman Show (because everyone has that non-serious half-fear every now and then) - it’s that this is a version of The Truman Show run by a directorial team of Pavlov and Dali, and they like to drink on the job.

As I was heading out of the house this morning after far too little sleep and with the image of the country painted blue refusing to leave my mind, the first song of the day that my mp3 player decides to throw up on shuffle was Pulp’s ‘Common People’. This was a bitter thing for it to do, yes, but on its own I could have overlooked it. Instead it seems the song was in fact there to soundtrack me, in a hurry and with thoughts elsewhere, crossing the hallway to open the front-door without noticing a blue-white-and-green Tory flyer that had come through the letterbox, stepping on it only for my foot to slip from under me and for me to slide forwards comically and nearly skid out the door and down the flight of steps. But I saved myself, collected myself, and I left - and still the same-as-ever surrealness doesn’t tire. I managed to walk casually for three whole minutes, but that must have been too long a period of normality. Next thing I knew I had somehow found myself stopped in the middle of the pavement of a crowded morning street having a conversation with a grey-haired strange woman who happened to have a tote-bag with the words JESUS LOVES YOU printed on it in big letters, while I stood opposite with slung over one shoulder my equally-graphically-demanding KARL WHO? bag, discussing in earnest emotional terms just what we thought Jesus and Karl would have to say about this election.

And then I was late two separate times for the same appointment. I am becoming a caricature of myself.