In some ways, it’s not surprising that the Marines were the only service to show up at a recruiting fair at a gay community center in Tulsa:
The Marines were the service most opposed to ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but they were the only one of five invited branches of the military to turn up with their recruiting table and chin-up bar at the center Tuesday morning. Although Marines pride themselves on being the most testosterone-fueled of the services, they also ferociously promote their view of themselves as the best. With the law now changed, the Marines appear determined to prove that they will be better than the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard in recruiting gay, lesbian and bisexual service members.
That whole article is worth a read, mainly because it was a ho-hum nothingburger event involving recruiters just doing their job.
In less pleasant news, Rick Santorum wants Google to remove the number one result for Santorum from their search engine, Google told him to contact the site owner, and Dan Savage is waiting for his call.
Finally, if you haven’t been watching GayHomophobe.com as closely as you should, the site that tracks the latest scandal involving gay-bashing hypocrites has added a new winner within the last week.
Lojasmo
The rules have changed, and the marines do nothing half-assed.
Baud
Ok, the WTF here is not that the Marines showed up to a recruiting fair at a gay community center. It’s that there is a gay community center holding a recruiting fair in fucking Tulsa, Oklahoma?
I guess that’s why they call Tulsa the San Francisco of the Southwest.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
They do?
geg6
Well, the Marines do have the most awesome dress uniform…
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: They will. :)
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Lojasmo: Eat the apple and fuck the corps.
cathyx
Tulsa is in the Southwest?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@geg6: The Navy Supply Corps School was here until this year. They had a Marine contingent and one morning a Marine came into the coffee shop in his dress blues and the girl behind the counter said “I love a soldier in uniform”! He smiled.
Baud
@cathyx: What region would you put it in? Midwest?
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Baud: What conference are the in? :)
malraux
@Baud: 2nd circle of Hell?
cathyx
@Baud: Yes.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): They
Tom Johnson
The Marines are nothing if not a can-do service. They execute the orders of their Commander-in-Chief with zeal and skill, no matter what. One more reason we should all be proud of them.
Baud
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Don’t follow college sports at all.
@malraux: LOL.
@cathyx: Google Maps seems to agree with you, but I don’t trust “experts.”
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Baud: It’s a joke, there is tremendous upheaval in college sports right now and nobody knows what the hell conference anyone is going to be in.
soonergrunt
The Marine Corps reported full compliance with the law and the CinC’s directives way ahead of the other services, and were likely the only ones in position execute the day after. I don’t know what the hold up would be for the others, but there was, to my knowledge, some institutional intransigence, particularly in the Air Force.
There are going to be incidents and problems for a while. There always are, but like integrating the races and integrating women, this too shall pass.
danno
I was friends with a number of closeted Marines when I was in the Corps in the early 90s. I once asked one of them why, out of all the branches, he signed up for the Marines. His response was “The Marines expect you to always look good in uniform and to work out every day. They might as well take out recruiting ads in The Advocate.” Good point.
JD Rhoades
@Tom Johnson:
In a conversation a few months ago, someone asked, as if it was some kind of winning argument, “what do you think the Marines are going to do if this repeal goes through? Huh?” A friend of mine who’s a former Marine spoke up: “You give a Marine something to do, he’ll do it with everything he has, whether he likes it or not.”
I’m glad those guys are on our side.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@soonergrunt: got your reply last night, thanks
soonergrunt
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Thank you, sir!
And, btw, Santorum
The Republic of Stupidity
Why is this ‘less pleasant news’?
Rick Santorum pleading with Dan Savage, begging him to “Make it stop… in the name of God, please make it STOP!” is a conversation i would pay to overhear…
Cat Lady
There are a lot ( R )s on that gayhomophobe.com list. Just sayin’.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Really, as I posted last night, all he’d doing is making more people write articles about it. Like the one at TPM.
– – –
“Colonel Manton, I want you to tell your men “run away.”
… I want you to be famous for those exact words. I want people to call you Colonel Runaway. I want children laughing outside your door, ’cause they’ve found the house of Colonel Runaway.” – Doctor Who
deep cap
Well, you need to remember that the Log Cabin Republicans see nothing wrong with being both Gay and Republican.
Paul in KY
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): I see we will probably get Missouri to go with Texas A&M. Missouri is an OK pick, I guess. State school, good football & basketball teams.
This will make Auburn move to the SEC East. As a UK supporter, I’m just excited by the chance of Auburn getting to whup us each year in football. Looks like Vandy is gonna whomp us this year as well.
Come on basketball season!
rikryah
the video of that soldier coming out to his father in Alabama just made me cry like a baby
MAJeff
@rikryah:
The thing that got to me was when he said, “Will you love me?” and “Do you still love me?” That’s the part of anti-LGBT oppression that too rarely gets highlighted in this type of discourse, and that sets it apart from many other forms of oppression. It’s the potential of losing a family due to being a member of a minority group. Many, many of us had those same questions running through our heads as we came out, and a large part of that is because we know folks whose families threw them out and stopped speaking to them, whose families stopped loving them.
PurpleGirl
Periodically I do a Google search for santorum and pick SpreadingSantorum as the site I want. Anything to help keep it #1 and make Baby Ricky cry. I loathe him.
deep cap
Oh yeah, and Rick Santorum is so clueless. I hated him from the moment he attacked video games, but really. He has no idea how
Googlethe Internettechnology works.Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Paul in KY: We play em every year so I guess it doesn’t matter here.
Paul in KY
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): See your point. Best of luck when you play them.
suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: You beat me to it. Damn.
I read that story about Rick Santorum (ew, that’s nasty, he should change that) having his fee-fees hurt and being so MAD at Google because they could totally alter their algorithm just for HIM! He’s such a persecuted rich white male! AWWW!
I’m sure you can deduce the nature of my feelings on the matter.
Anyway, I have a good friend who’s in the Army (in Afghanistan right now) who’s been out fairly publicly for a long time. I’m very relieved that no one can kick his ass out now. Except, I have to say, if I were him, I might want to play that card in order to GTFO of Afghanistan. But he’s braver than I am.
suzanne
@PurpleGirl:
My husband, who is a far more reasonable and calm person than I am, was literally screaming at our television while we watched the last debate. “HE’S SUCH AN ASSHOLE! GOD! I just want to give him noogies! HE’S JUST SUCH AN ASSHOLE!”
Something about that fuckstain (get it? ’cause he’s SANTORUM!) just brings that out of people.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@PurpleGirl: Maybe John could setup the home page so that anytime someone accesses it, it performs background searches for Santorum on all of the major search engines.
A Mom Anon
@rikryah: I saw that this morning on the news,made me tear up,still does a couple hours later.
Now maybe once people figure out that this isn’t the end of civilization as we know it,gay people can get married throughout the land and we can move the hell on to stuff that REALLY hurts families and communities.
Linda Featheringill
In Tulsa, yet?
I lived in Tulsa for a couple of years. Of course, that was back in the Stone Age. As I remember it, not the most liberal town.
Good looking town, though. It’s laid out very well and the residents maintain things well.
[Maybe the Marines are running on Tulsa time?]
Brian R.
The Daily Show had a clip last night of a gay soldier who’d been anonymously blogging about his experiences with DADT calling his father to let him know he was gay.
It got a little dusty in our house watching the clip.
schrodinger's cat
When Mr. schrodinger’s cat ran the Marine Corps Marathon I got to see the Marines in action. The event was efficiently run and there was a lot of eye candy to ogle at!
Cacti
@Paul in KY:
As a former Missourian, I thought going to the Big Ten would have made more sense. The state’s two largest media markets (STL & KC) are more midwestern than southern in their cultural orienatation.
But the Big Ten didn’t want them.
Roger Moore
@JD Rhoades:
No such thing. He may be a retired Marine, but he’s still a Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine.
soonergrunt
just because it’s so much fun.
Santorum
soonergrunt
@Linda Featheringill: With the exception of ORU, Tulsa is almost as ‘less conservative’ as Norman.
jibeaux
@deep cap: He seemed genuinely confused as to why google, which he referred to as a “website”, couldn’t just fix this for him.
With any luck, every few months he’ll keep giving press conferences in which he complains that something vile and despicable comes up when you google his name.
When I get home, I’ll google it just to make sure Dan’s link stays on the side of the angels.
Paul in KY
@Cacti: Well, if you look at the North American continent, Missouri is in the ‘Southeast’ of it ;-)
I know the basketball & football competition will be tougher in SEC than in Big 10. Don’t know about all the minor sports, though (track, baseball, and golf are SEC specialities).
I think UM is a fine school & will be a credit to our conference. Welcome aboard!
WereBear
I don’t feel a bit sorry for Santorum and why on earth is he not picking up trash on the side of the road as a match for “talents”? He doesn’t know how search engines work and he’s a lawyer who wants to run the country?
I wouldn’t let him pick up my trash.
Stefan
@cathyx:
Well, where else is it? It’s not in the South. It’s not in the Midwest.
Stefan
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Of course, technically, a Marine is not “a soldier in uniform”, as Marines aren’t soldiers.
Stefan
@MAJeff:
The flip side of this, though, is why I think the tidal wave of acceptance has moved the other way so quickly the last ten years in terms of gay rights. It’s one thing to be prejudiced against groups who will always be other to you (blacks, Jews, Muslims, damn dirty apes, whatever). It’s another to be prejudiced against a group and then suddenly discover that you’ve been discriminating against your own family and friends.
Stefan
It’s that there is a gay community center holding a recruiting fair in fucking Tulsa, Oklahoma?
I have a friend whose brother is the Oklahoma National Guard, currently serving in Afghanistan on this third tour. He’s gay and has been out to his unit for years (hey, everyone already knows your business in small-town Oklahoma). They’re completely fine with it, and have made it known to everyone else that if they’ve got a problem with him, then they’ve got a problem with the whole platoon as well….
Admiral_Komack
I would like to thank President Obama and those in his administration for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
Yutsano
Yup.
mellowjohn
years ago, i read a book about the collapse in 1982 of the penn square bank in OK City. the money quote was something to the effect that “this wouldn’t have happened in a more sophisticated place, like tulsa.”
ppcli
Santorum has been spinning this by saying gays are mad at him for comparing gay relationships to “polygamy or incest”. Yes, I suppose that would be a bad thing to do, Frothy, but that’s not why. Maybe to hammer home the point, Savage should offer Santorum a deal – Savage will take down the Spreading Santorum site if Santorum will post the following on his own webpage and leave it up: “It was shameful of me to compare gay sex to “man on dog” beastiality and I sincerely apologize for this despicable comparison. Gay Americans harm no one by pursuing the lives that bring them happiness and their relationships should be celebrated.”
See – Savage is willing to be reasonable. Such a small concession. Your move, Frothy.
Catsy
@Stefan: That, and the Internet. I hesitate to be one of those people trying to give credit to the Internet for changing everything, but I can’t help thinking that it played a big part in “normalizing” homosexuality. If you lived in a small town in the 80’s or early 90’s, chances are good that you were rarely–if ever–exposed to an openly gay person or information about how gay people behave and live. You probably had no idea just how many there were across the country–perhaps thinking they were mostly clustered in places like San Francisco or New York.
The free flow of information and interconnectedness enabled by the ubiquity of the Internet made that kind of insular ignorance much, much harder to maintain.
Homophobes were right to fear even the smallest foothold of gay marriage as a slippery slope to widespread acceptance: they knew that once gay people could marry anywhere and demonstrate what a big nothingburger it is to the lives and marriages of everyone else, their fearmongering would lose a lot of its potency–and they would lose a lot of their credibility. It has, and they have.
Catsy
Additionally: I really think the repeal of DADT is the final nail in the coffin of acceptable, institutionalized homophobia. How can anyone manufacture a defensible basis for excluding or persecuting gays when the United States Marine Corps welcomes them?
There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle, and–again–the bigots knew it, which is why they fought tooth and nail to preserve this discriminatory policy at all costs. DOMA is still on the books–but with DADT gone, it won’t be for long.
That’s not to say people won’t still be assholes–the Civil Rights Act and desegregation of the military certainly didn’t end racism. But the worm has turned.
Davis X. Machina
Semper Fey.
Yutsano
@Catsy:
It’s rather difficult to label someone as weak or a sissy when they’re a member of the deadliest fighting force on the planet. And have all the training to back that up.
Catsy
@Yutsano: Bingo.
Paul in KY
@Yutsano: I’ve heard the ROK bootcamp is no picnic. Raven might have a take on that.
Yutsano
@Paul in KY: It’s my understanding the 13 weeks in Parris or San Diego is one of the most brutal and trying experiences a human can endure. And the Marines keep it that way on purpose. The ROK is probably pretty tough, but living in a constant state of war will do that.
Gilles de Rais
@Catsy: This is what I was saying yesterday. The policy itself was irrelevant as of almost a decade ago; the soldiers didn’t give a shit, and the officers didn’t either, unless you threw it in their faces to force them to throw you out (Lt. Choi). But it meant a lot to the cretins and bigots, and now they are done. There is no public institution in the United States left that can legally discriminate against gays in any way save for that of marriage, and that’s next up against the wall.
I heard some woman sobbing on the radio yesterday about the “San Francisco Army, Obama’s San Francisco Army” and laughed my ass off. The palpable rage and defeat in her voice said more than her hateful words ever could.
We’re coming to an end of the culture wars, I think. We lost gun control, won gay rights, and fought abortion to a draw (it will never be illegal in urban blue areas, and is de facto illegal in red rural areas). Point is, when the culture wars are done, what will the right have left?
Answer: Nothing.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Catsy:
Ditto that.
Somebody (I’m afraid I forgot who) pointed out another irony in all this, which is that LGBT folks are asking for the right to do some of the most culturally small-c conservative things a person can do: express their patriotism by serving in the military, settle down and get married, and adopt and raise children. It doesn’t get much more old fashioned pillar of the community than that. Movement Conservatives are constantly wailing and gnashing their teeth about how our society supposedly lacks these values today, and yet when a group of people not like them are willing to step up to the plate and get the job done, the MC answer is NO? WTF is up with that!?
Movement Conservatives: standing athwart the tracks that lead to better citizens and stronger, healthier community values and yelling: STOP!
Stefan
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
It’s a good point. What’s been their message for the past twenty years? No you shouldn’t serve in the military. No you shouldn’t get married. No you shouldn’t have children. No you shouldn’t form a stable family. No you shouldn’t be able to care for each when you’re sick. No you shouldn’t be able to pass on property. For a supposedly “conservative” party, they sure don’t want their fellow citizens to do “conservative” things.
ruemara
@Davis X. Machina:
the internets. thou hast won them.
Rihilism
@Davis X. Machina: HA! My kind of humor, that….
Paul in KY
@Yutsano: Marine bootcamp is super tough. I think any difference between ours & the ROK one is that they still beat the shit out of their recruits (legally).
I have a cousin who went thru Parris Island in 1972. He was forced into the Marines, due to being a small time hoodlum. He later told me ‘Paul, they beat the shit out of me every day’. I will say that he has gone on to live a very productive life, is a proud Marine & has 3 very nice kids.
Rihilism
I look forward to the day when we have plenty of big ole’ squishy, mincing Marines. Then, perhaps, we can put all this fear and derision of effeminate behavior behind us…
“SSSSPHINXSSS!”…
James E. Powell
Are people under the impression that gay males are not fueled by testosterone?
Mnemosyne
@Stefan:
I still think the crack in the wall was the AIDS crisis. All of those poignant stories about dying people being cut off from their loved ones because their families didn’t approve were really horrendous and the kind of thing that people could identify with. It let people say, “Okay, I still think that what they do together is gross, but that’s just not fair.”
I may be naive, but I do think that Americans still have a very strong sense that things should be fair for everyone. The trick the conservatives pulled was convincing white voters that minorities were getting “special treatment” when they asked for the same rights as everyone else. That’s why they love to talk about marriage rights for gay people as “special rights” — it inhibits that desire for fairness that Americans have and convinces them that the person/group is asking for something additional.
Catsy
@Mnemosyne:
Yup.
Republicans know that if Americans are ever presented with a comprehensive, factual, neutral description of the competing visions they and Democrats have for the country, Americans prefer Democratic solutions by vast, overwhelming majorities. It is why they have to resort to fearmongering, dishonest frames and outright lies like “death tax”, “special rights”, and “death panels” instead of factual descriptions of policy. It is why they have to lie about Democrats, lie about history, lie about the demonstrable results of economic policy, and lie almost everything they intend to do, concealing or distorting their agenda as much as possible in order to get elected. They have nothing on their side except fear and lies.
And it is why in nearly every single policy battle fought in the last 40 years, conservatives have lost the fight once the facts are clear and widely known enough for majorities to see through Republican lies.
Republicans have to lie in order to win, and they know it. It’s why Republican projection–accusing their opponents of the very things of which they’re guilty–has become so commonplace as to be cliche.
It’s also one of the reasons they are so radicalized on the subject of gun control: they know it’s the one area of policy where the majority of Americans prefer the conservative viewpoint. I don’t have to like that, but I’m at least honest enough to admit it.
Stefan
@Mnemosyne:
I think that Americans still have a very strong sense that things should be fair for everyone who is also like them.
The AIDS crisis, in that case, let them see that gays are just like them, in that it made it impossible for people who were sick to stay in the closet — they literally began wearing a mark on their bodies — and therefore made the fact that these were their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends and co-workers suddenly and painfully visible to them.
As I said above, some of these people could keep hating blacks, say, because their son or daughter wasn’t going to one day become black. They never had to face the real human cost of their bigotry. But when they had to balance their hatred of gays with their love for their family, their love for their family — though not, to my continued horror and bafflement, always — won out.
BDeevDad
I thought this was brilliant. A politician in North Carolina when asked about a slippery slope for gay marriage, completely did a 180 on the guy and asked him where do they stop denying rights to people.
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne:
Well, yeah, AIDS was an eye-opener, and not just because people can be empathetic. The real eye-opener, for a lot of people, was that suddenly “real” people, their friends & family and idols, were “exposed” as homosexuals. Roy Cohn, Rock Hudson, their “perennial bachelor” brother, their nephew who just couldn’t seem to find the right girl, some guy in the accounting department, two of the three under-fifty priests in the six contiguous parishes.
As late as the mid-80s, I knew otherwise bright individuals who insisted they had never met a homosexual. That’s just not possible any more. As long as individual gays had the (quite often essential, even life-saving) option of “passing for straight”, the average low-information voter could successfully believe that homosexuality was a vanishingly rare disorder, like progeria — very sad, but not actually something one needed to think about. Once it became tragically obvious that LGBTs are everywhere, in every family, people had to re-adjust. And the good news is… most of them did (do), most of the time, with the minimal amount of grumbling. Some rump of the 27%s are gonna bitch & moan forever, because it’s better than looking at their own sorry lives and/or because they can make a buck off their bitching, but the closets are emptying at a rate that would’ve amazed the “reasonable” gay activists even 25 years ago.
Data point: Massachusetts was the first state to legalize gay marriage. The longer gay marriage has been in effect, the more Massachusetts voters approve of gay marriage. That’s why the homophobe holdouts are screaming so loud — they know that once their former supporters discover the nice couple down the block doesn’t show up at the neighborhood meeting wearing nothing but pleather chaps & a feather boa, and the assistant administrator with the photo of his beefy husband next to his pc doesn’t start cruising the restrooms, the homophobes have lost.
suzanne
@Gilles de Rais:
We’re currently in another round of Fuck Poor People. This time, the poor are brown-flavored.
Neil H
@Gilles de Rais:
There’s still Islam…
PanurgeATL
@Neil H:
And HIPPIES!! One aspect of the gay community’s current configuration is that in the end they’ve proven rather willing to throw the FREEKS under the bus. I always figured that if you could successfully defend those who were hardest to defend, the rest would follow. Guess not…
As for “won” and “lost”, why would you ever conceive things that way (as opposed to “winning” and “losing”) unless you didn’t really have that much skin in the game?
soonergrunt
@Anne Laurie:
At lest those people are going to their HOA meetings. We can hardly ever get a quorum at ours, so we can’t vote expenditures (like new trees and shrubbery or irrigation in the commons) but everybody bitches in email about how they can’t see us making any improvements to the neighborhood. If I had a couple of people come to the meeting, I’d offer to put their picture on the website.
SergeantJohn
I could wish that the Army had been there first, but it is entirely appropriate for the Corps to be first to hit this particular beach. I don’t know whether I can credit the Marines as a whole for the appearance, but locally at least, here’s a recruiting station that demonstrated courage, integrity and initiative.
They deserve a big PR win.
CCinRI
HOO RAH