Military Gay Discharge Moratorium Bill A Non-Starter
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has decided not to pursue a senate amendment that would pause military discharges based on sexual orientation, gay weekly the Washington Blade reported. Gillibrand, the freshman senator appointed by Governor David Paterson after President Obama tapped Hillary Clinton to head the State Department, signaled last week she would introduce the reform as an amendment to a Defense Department reauthorization bill. The amendment would place an 18-month moratorium on the military gay ban, also known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that prescribes discharge for gay and lesbian service members who do not remain celibate or closeted.
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When asked, this gay soldier told
TUSTIN In a calm corner of his garage, a soldier rummages through reminders of the last ten years of his life. Silver coins. A Middle Eastern sash. An Army pistol. Only a few of the souvenirs in Dan Choi’s war chest will fit into his travel duffel.
As he packs, his mom walks in. She reaches around her son’s boulder-sized biceps for a hug.
“Are you staying for dinner?”
“I’m not sure.”
By nightfall, though, Choi will surely be gone. He’s getting out of Tustin, maybe for good.
Monumental change has unsettled the 28-year-old combat veteran and his family. In March, on national television, he said, “I am gay.”
That was news to a lot of people, including his bosses. And, the three short words thrust Choi into the limelight, booked his calendar with equal-rights rallies – and earned him a pink slip from the military.
But all the cameras and microphones that have trailed Choi since then have captured only part of the story. They haven’t been privy to his parents’ distress, his past anxieties or his newfound sense of liberation.
Thousands of other troops have gotten booted for outing themselves (or being outed) as gay or lesbian. But, like clockwork, most have disappeared from public view. Choi figures he will too at some point.
But he’s not going away now, and he’s not going away quietly.
HIGH SCHOOL LOWS
Over loudspeakers, he ranted.
It was 1998, and President Clinton was getting grilled by national media for his then-alleged affair with a 22-year-old intern. At Tustin High School, Choi, 17, took on the role of Clinton scold. He locked himself in a room and commandeered the public address system to decry the commander-in-chief’s weakness and offer what he saw as a cure-all: faith in Jesus Christ.
Choi’s sister, Grace, then a freshman, recalls her brother’s outburst as “surprising, but not embarrassing.”
Their dad, a Baptist minister who fought in the South Korean Army, helped raise his three kids to battle against injustice and sin. Years later, that duty to speak out would inspire Choi to talk about his sexuality – and throw a crimp in their father-son relationship.
“I always think of the story of a throng of people telling Christ to silence his disciples,” Choi says, adding: “And Christ said, ‘… if they keep quiet, the rocks will cry out.’”
But, in high school at least, Choi’s bold talk came with a cost. The acne-faced student body president lost his job as morning news announcer, and was forced into a sabbatical from student government.
Graduation cleaned his slate. Reinstated as president, the straight-A student gave a parting address to his peers. And, bound for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Choi left a rousing, two-page letter in the back of his own yearbook.
“Leave your kingdom,” he wrote to himself, “to be a lonely plebe down in the dump.”
STANDING UP
In a forest near the academy, Choi smeared earth-tone paint on his face and hunkered down with his rifle. Energy-sapping practice missions, he says, were key to his college experience.
On campus, Choi studied environmental engineering. Critically, he also began mastering Arabic.
And he held onto his faith. He led Bible studies in the dorms and recited the “Cadet Prayer” every Sunday with the West Point choir. “Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong,” he prayed, “and to never to be content with a half truth when the whole can be won.”
Still, Choi concealed a truth. Since fourth grade, he had begged God to take away his attraction to other males. In college, he says, he remained unwilling to “explore” his sexuality.
In 2003, the Iraq War kicked into gear. Choi, now clear-faced and brawny, was soon sent to serve in the Persian Gulf.
There, he says he “greased hands” with elder Muslim Sheikhs, patrolled the Triangle of Death and designed a reverse-osmosis water plant for Baghdad citizens. He also passed on his knowledge of Arabic, as a teacher to thousands of American troops.
Throughout it all, compelled by the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, Choi kept mum about his sexual preference.
His final wartime task, delivering backpacks full of cash to contractors, kept him awake at night. It was around the time of that mission, sleepless in the desert, that he started asking a tough question:
Do I really want to keep lying?
When his tour ended, he wanted to boomerang back to Iraq. But that dream was brought to a halt in March when, on behalf of scores of West Point alumni and active-duty servicemembers, he went public with his sexual orientation.
WAR IN PEACE
On his last afternoon in town, rice steams in the kitchen as, upstairs, Choi sorts through a box of Army accolades.
“Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll be one of those stodgy old veterans wearing all his stuff,” he says, laughing, clutching a handful of medals.
Proud but tired of the half-truth, the highly decorated soldier returned from Iraq in 2008 and ditched reenlistment. Instead, he became a platoon leader in the National Guard. Stationed in New York, he met someone, parked down the street and lived in his car to be close to his first boyfriend.
Then Choi came home to Tustin to come out to his mom and dad – 19 times in fact, to show he wasn’t bluffing. He handed his dad a copy of the book “Loving Someone Gay.” A few days later he discovered it unopened on the floor of his closet.
“They don’t accept it,” Choi says. “And I don’t think they will anytime soon.”
Neither will the military. After his first of several prime time TV appearances, Choi, the rare Arabic-speaking serviceman, received an ultimatum from his employer – accept discharge or stand trial.
His chances before a judge seem slim, based on the dismissal of 12,500 past soldiers.
But he believes the fortunes of an estimated 65,000 gay and lesbian members of the armed forced could be changed if Congress were to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a move President Obama favors. So, Choi keeps talking to news anchors and shouting to crowds, which strains his home life – and, recently, compelled him to pack up and move.
“Silence is not a right,” Choi says.
“Silence is an unacceptable, inexcusable wrong.”
See When asked, this gay soldier told
OCRegister
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Hundreds protest anti-gay, anti-Jewish group’s arrival In RHode Island
Hundreds of Rhode Islanders turned out on street corners Friday in spontaneous opposition to the anti-gay, anti-Jew message of a tiny group of demonstrators from Kansas. More than 300 students from East Providence High School crammed one corner of the city’s busiest intersection at Taunton and Pawtucket avenues as school let out. Some gripped neon signs supporting gay people. During the school day, students also wore yarmulkes to support their Jewish classmates. At another corner, 100 or so people, including high school alumni, gathered, holding signs such as “Teach Love, Not Hate” and “Our Giant Signs are Better than Yours.” One even had a pink bunny suit on with “I Love Boys” written on his belly. On a third corner, five members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., carried epithet-laden picket signs, denouncing homosexuality and declaring, “America is doomed” for tolerating gays and Jews. Various counter-protestors chanted — “Go Home” or “Gay is the Way” — and for a short time the shouts unified in obscenities. “I know a lot of gay people in my family,” freshman Jayden DeCosta said. “It’s anybody’s right to do what they want.”
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Look Who’s in Bed Together on Gay Marriage Fight
L ying on his cot in the Longworth House Office Building in the small of the night, Jason Chaffetz had a scary dream: The conservative Republican from Utah had beaten the odds, defeated an incumbent and made it to Washington, only to end up by some bizarre twist of events arm-in-arm with Marion Barry, the crack-smoking laughingstock former mayor of the District of Columbia.
“Oh man, if I had run a campaign saying I’d be working closely with Marion Barry, I don’t know that I would have been elected,” Chaffetz says.
The nightmare turns out to be reality: Chaffetz, once the placekicker on the Brigham Young University football team, is now the ranking Republican on the House subcommittee in charge of D.C. affairs, and in that role he is leading the rush against the District’s decision to recognize same-sex marriages. The freshman congressman is utterly confident that his is the moral position on the issue, but he admits to a certain frisson of doubt when he learned that his accidental ally in this fight is the former Mayor for Life, an erstwhile champion of gay rights who has decided that same-sex nuptials are immoral.
Chaffetz has never met Barry, but he’s willing to have lunch with the man — if Barry is willing to meet at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, the only Washington restaurant the congressman frequents. (This may prove to be a stumbling block, as Barry leans more toward fruit juices and health foods these days.)
If the two do break bread, they’ll discover that they share a view that gay couples ought to have the same legal rights as any other Americans, but should not be permitted to marry. They’ll take comfort in the fact that their views are both based on the biblical definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. They’re both happy to point to the fact that President Obama is also opposed to gay marriage.
But the lunch is destined not to be a lovefest. It’s not just that Chaffetz and Barry come from wildly disparate backgrounds or represent very different Americas, although it is true that Chaffetz’s district is 88 percent white and only 25 percent of his constituents have a college degree, whereas Washington is 56 percent black and 45 percent of its residents have a bachelor’s or beyond.
See Look Who’s in Bed Together on Gay Marriage Fight
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This is how weak the GOP is today: for some, Virginia Foxx, GOP Hero
Virginia Foxx is decent church-goin’ woman with a mean, pinched, bitter evil face and she is the GOP’s parliamentary superstar, handling the Rules Committee and the familes of hate crimes victims with the same grace.
The Rules Committee is one of the most important committees in Congress. It decides amendments, debate length, and basically determines when and how bills get to the floor. So Virginia Foxx’s role, as a member of the minority party, is to be as big a pain in the ass as possible. Which is why she keeps making other members cry!
In January, Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) was testifying on the stimulus bill but left the committee room and did not return after Foxx drew a comparison between his handling of the bill and his habit of fiddling with a pencil.
Now this is not too terrible, because Dave Obey can be kind of a dick himself.
But:
She has also been an effective attack dog on the House floor. In March, Foxx caused freshman Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio) to become so flustered after an exchange about Kilroy’s vote on the American International Group Inc. bailout that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) soon held a parliamentary boot camp for Democratic freshmen to avoid future incidents.
Once again, not too bad. Parliamentary dickery is a time-honored House tradition, and the Dems could probably use a toughening up.
But where is the anecdote that basically proves that this is a small-minded, hateful, simplistic, miserable excuse for an elected official? Oh, here it is:
Foxx’s most public gaffe came last week during debate over the hate crimes bill. One of the pieces of the bill is named for Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old man murdered in 1998 because of his sexual orientation. Foxx said naming the bill for Shepard was a “hoax” because his murder “wasn’t because he was gay.”
It should be noted that Foxx said this while Matthew Shepard’s mother sat a couple feet away from her. It should also be noted that Matthew Shepard was, in fact, tortured and murdered because he was gay.
See Virginia Foxx, GOP Hero Gawker
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UTAH GOP Rep wants to kill gay marriaeg in DC
Update: Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) rejected Chaffetz’s blustering. “For this to be overturned, it’d have to pass both houses and be signed by the president, and that’s highly unlikely,” he said.
Yesterday, the DC Council overwhelmingly approved a bill recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states, by a vote of 12 to 1. It is the latest victory for LGBT rights, coming just days after the state legislatures in New Hampshire and Maine approved gay marriage, after Vermont became the fourth state to make gay marriage legal last month.
Marriage equality in the nation’s capitol, however, is too much for freshman Rep. John Chaffetz (R-UT, above), who is refusing to let the issue “go softly into the night“:
“Some things are worth fighting for, and this is one of them,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), the ranking Republican on a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that oversees the District. “It’s not something I can let go softly into the night. … I recognize the Democrats are in the majority, but I represent the majority of Americans on this issue.”
The City Desk noted Chaffetz’s Twitter explanation for why he would use Congress to intervene: “Why am I involved? Congress is set up to oversee the affairs of D.C. I am one of the Members of the relevant committee.”
Chaffetz’s disrespect for the District’s citizens by no means a new development. Opposing a bill to give DC residents a voting member in the House, Chaffetz insisted “the best” proposal was simply to give the city to Maryland:
The best alternative is retrocession of residential areas of D.C. back to Maryland, as was done with Arlington, Va. Under this option, D.C. residents would receive not only a vote in the House and two in the Senate, but a state legislature, a governor and many other benefits.
In March, Chaffetz railed, “Keep government limited, keep it out of our way, and empower the American people.” Apparently, he meant to add, “so long as they’re not gay.”
- See Chaffetz leads fight against DC gay marriage law
Deseret News - - Chaffetz: Federal Funding Means Congress Can Nix DC Gay Marriage Bill Washington City Paper
- Chaffetz: Gay Marriage Rights In DC Are ‘Not Something I Can Let … Think Progress
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Gay Marriage In New York Now Seen As Unlikely in ’09 or ’10.
Huffington Post – New York,NY,USA
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