Catching up on the news

A few stories I mean to blog earlier, but I was attending a board meeting (incidentally, our president is named Jesus and that first day in the board meeting Jesus was at the head of table surrounded by 13 of us. Coincidence?)

So, here’s an unsurprising fact: when the military needs cannon fodder, suddenly they don’t seem as interested in rooting out the homosexuals:

The number of gay and lesbian service members discharged under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has dropped by almost half since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and is at its lowest level since the Defense Department began keeping such figures in 1997.

Significant declines have occurred in every branch of the armed forces, according to statistics released yesterday by the Pentagon. The Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy discharged fewer gay men and lesbians in 2004 than in any year since the Pentagon began tallying the number of its “homosexual separations” eight years ago. The Army’s discharges represented the lowest number of discharges in five years.

… Gay rights organizations said the decline is easy to explain: Pressed for personnel since the battle against terrorism began, the military needs to keep its numbers up and is not discharging gays as it once did.

It may be more subtle than that, however, said Charles Moskos, professor emeritus of military sociology at Northwestern University and an architect of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” concept.

He said the vast majority of dismissals for violations of “don’t ask, don’t tell” come when service members volunteer their sexual orientation to their superiors. Less than 20 percent of the discharges resulted from personnel being caught with a member of the same sex in a compromising position or from investigations of their conduct.

… “It may be that if someone tells . . . they don’t let them go now,” Moskos said. Declaring one’s homosexuality is still “the easiest way to get out with an honorable discharge,” he said, adding that “being a conscientious objector is a big hassle.”

… Groups that advocate for the abolishment of “don’t ask, don’t tell” said the new figures point out the hypocrisy of the military’s position that homosexuals are bad for morale, given that gay men and lesbians are less likely to be discharged in times of war, when troops are needed most.

“Our general view is that these discharges show that we just don’t need ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” Alexander said. The numbers are down because, in a time of war, we need the best and the brightest that we can get. And the best and brightest include gay soldiers.”

The bit about how being a conscientious objector is a hassle is interesting. Yesterday I heard an interview on the radio with an objector who pointed out the weirdness of the military mind. He said that he was subjected to lengthy interviews and psychological tests, treated like a liar or crazy person because he said that he didn’t want to kill another human being. Yet, when people come to the military and literally say that they want to kill or enjoy killing, they are welcomed with open arms and treated as if they are completely normal, their mental status unquestioned.

Next, a treatise on civil rights and same-sex marriage from Colbert King:

The breadth of legally sanctioned segregation and discrimination 100 years ago remains a historical shame. But what will Americans 100 years down the road think when they examine our era?

In 1905, when the Niagara Movement — forerunner to the NAACP — was born, nowhere was the color line more heat-tempered and rock-hard than when it came to sex. The prohibition against interracial marriage was a national obsession, enshrined in both law and tradition.

… The arguments mounted against interracial marriage also had a familiar ring. Fact and God played heavily in the judgments.

The Georgia Supreme Court in 1869 based its interracial marriage ban on natural law, observing that “the God of nature made it otherwise, and no human law can produce it, and no human tribunal can enforce it.”

… A host of state anti-miscegenation laws — strongly backed by white public sentiment — were upheld in state courts well into the 20th century. The reasoning was simple and absolute: Marriage between the races defied the natural order; intermarriage bans had legitimate historical roots and were based on a “divinely ordained” scheme. Conclusion: Government had the right to define marriage as a union of two persons of the same race.

It remained that way for generations, until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, ruled that state laws setting forth who can marry whom violate “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men” — marriage — and the “principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

So much, therefore, for the ruling of the Virginia judge who, in 1959, had sentenced the interracial couple, the Lovings, stating: “Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

… Now fast-forward past today to 100 years from now. How will future generations view our present-day fight against allowing monogamous couples with life commitments to each other to marry? What will they think of our rush to enact state laws prohibiting same-sex life partners from joining the same institution shared by different-sex couples? How will they regard our assertion that there is a public interest in promoting discrimination in the marriage statute?

Let’s get one issue out of the way before the e-mails and letters start flooding in. I don’t equate the long, bloody struggle of African Americans against racial injustice, ugly brutality and unjust treatment with the effort to give equal rights to lesbians and gay men.

But I do believe that homosexuals are subject to prejudice and that they are forbidden the same rights and safeguards that heterosexuals enjoy, including the right to marry. That, in my book, is wrong.

Bravo.

The Washington City Paper takes a look at the new free paper The Washington Examiner, and notes an interesting pattern to the distribution of the tabloid, owned and operated by a Christian fundamentalist and ultra right winger:

To demystify the Examiner’s D.C. home-delivery patterns, Dept. of Media called 274 advisory neighborhood commissioners and received responses from 119. The question, in each case, was straightforward: Have you received home delivery of the Washington Examiner? To supplement the data, Dept. of Media interviewed scores of other residents and conducted several field trips to District neighborhoods.

According to the survey, majority-black neighborhoods are lucky to get even spotty service. The paper’s red plastic missives tend to land in exclusively white neighborhoods, with a some exceptions here and there. (Cleveland Park, for instance, doesn’t seem to be included.) The survey results overlap closely with U.S. Department of the Census data on race in D.C. (See accompanying maps.)

[via Why.I.Hate.DC wherein you can also read the latest headlines in the war between Moonie Rag (The Times) and Fundie Rag (The Examiner) as they battle to win the title of Most Insane.]

One last thing: Jason Kottke links to an LA Times story (and since I am tired of registering for news sites, I haven’t read the story) wherein

Disney’s Eisner describes Pixar’s computerized human characters as “pretty pathetic”.

Brilliant strategy: bad mouth your only films that make a profit. This is like McDonald’s claiming that their own fries are greasy and taste bad. Next headline: “Disney’s outgoing leader tells movie goers not to bother seeing Disney movies.”? What in the world has happened to Michael Eisner? Wasn’t he once the savior of Disney? Now he just seems to be clearly insane.