Practicalmadness

Plastic has this thrilling story about the US Armed Forces’ policy of discharging homosexuals for being gay, including a short breakdown of who’s been fired:

As the war in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions continue to cause alarm, and the US Senate determines the military needs more troops, the US military continues to discharge specialists for homosexuality, including experts in weapons of mass distruction:

Hundreds of those discharged in all military branches held high-level job specialties that required years of training and expertise. The study found that 49 nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare specialists were discharged, as well as 90 nuclear power engineers and 150 rocket and missile specialists.

Eighty-eight linguists were discharged, including at least seven Arab language specialists.

Just to clarify to those Americans who may have been assuming that ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ discharges were all confused 19-year-old gay men who you didn’t want hanging around your own not-confused, definitely not gay 19-year-old killing machine. These discharges may actually, like, hurt the US’s capability for carrying out peacekeeping missions, intelligence and covert ops in the war on terror, nuclear weapons control and basically anything that does not involve killing brown people and making brown people want to kill us.

To recap, gays in the military are: Interrogators, nuclear weapons specialists, soldiers, spies and people you want hanging around if there’s ever a sarin gas attack.

Gays in the military are not: wearing pink camouflage. At least hopefully not in the workplace. There is a time and place to be fabulous, and while disarming a nuke or questioning an al-Qaeda member is (usually) not it.