Court rules against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

[Coyote]

The military has some grandiose ways to deal with people that want to get out of a deployment. One popular way is to get "injured" (so many grown men falling down stairs!) and go on "medical hold". You end up on what's known as a "medical profile", which limits your activity, and of course you have to stay at the mobilization post for endless rounds of "observation" "checkups" and "physical therapy".

Basically, you end up doing flunky work. Janitorial and lawn care are two popular pastimes for Med Holds, as are endless 12-hour shifts of phone answering. The trick to it all, is that those of us who went to Iraq and back will frequently see the same poor bastards that we left on Med Hold still stuck where we left them, and they watch with sad, puppy-dog eyes as we turn in our gear, process out, and go home while they stay on Med Hold. I've heard tales (dunno if they're true or not) of people being stuck on Med Hold for 2 years or more.

So if someone just walks up and says "I'm queer as a 3-dollar-bill, sir!" the bullshit alarms go off and, maybe even more than "gay issues" the immediate concern is "shirking duty/whiner". The climate is changing, and more and more of the Army's junior soldiers and "middle management" (younger NCOs and junior officers) increasingly don't care about DADT issues more so than 'wimps & whiners' trying to game the system.

The shortage of soldiers is one of the biggest reasons why so many are nowadays, informally, ignoring gay issues in the military. There's nothing like a war to get one's priorities straight, and when you need all the triggermen/women you can find, the gay issue becomes secondary in the eyes of many. Again, it is not universal and there's still a lot of well-dug-in types that will resist the idea of "gays" ("gays" being used as a catchall, naturally no offense or exclusion is intended) serving, but increasingly more of those people are the ones approaching retirement.

But again, when the DADT policy gets picked apart, and the Federal Government has to recognise gays, and gender issues themselves start to become a topic of consideration, the basis for many anti-gay laws across the country will be dealt a blow and the countdowns can begin in some cases.