I don’t have a truly informed opinion on DADT. I am not in the military and have never been, so it’s not my place to simply give my opinion other than when prefaced with “IMO” and not as anything else. Much like I believe a company’s hiring practices should be decided by the company and not the government, the decisions about the military should be decided by those who are serving. Who am I to tell them what to do? And who are you to tell me (as a private company) who to hire? But the fact is, there are laws in place telling me what I can or cannot do about hiring *in a private company* and how I can fire them even when they completely suck and take advantage of my/our generosity.
So for all the fanfare and tweets (good grief people) and news stories about DADT, I only care about your opinion if you are serving in the military, or have served, and have the knowledge to tell me what is good or not.
And when people have to be let go at my company, or when trying to find the right person to fill a position, I will try and use my (our) best judgment for what is best for us. And I don’t really care what you (the Royal You :) ) or the government think. But sadly, we don’t completely have that luxury in this land of the free.
6:22 pm on December 18th, 2010
Great post. I’m in the military and have mixed thoughts on this.
There are already gay people in the military, so the question becomes, does knowing they are change anything?
My bigger concern is a lot of the issues that no one seems to address, like same sex marriages – most states don’t even have this worked out, so how is this going to work in a military that recognizes same gender relationships.
6:12 am on December 20th, 2010
Maybe I’m too simplistic, but does it really matter what you are as long as you are the best person to get the job done? Decriminalising your orientation as far as the military goes makes a lot of sense to me.
I’ve worked at places where basically the only way to get rid of someone is if you caught that person in the act of murder – and even that was iffy. Dang lawyers and HR people…. :)
11:06 am on December 22nd, 2010
Seriously…something needs to be done about those departments :)