Don't Ask, Don't Tell Is GOOD Policy.*

Chairman Mullen says regarding the DADT policy: "we have in place a policy that forces young men and women to lie about who they are"

Bullshit

It requires them to not come out and tell god-and-everybody they enjoy doing things that ought not to be done.

What you do with your jimmy is not 100% of your personality, if you are a normal person with a sound mind. If it is so all-consuming a part of your ever-lovin' self that EVERYONE YOU KNOW must know what you like to do with your jimmy, you have bigger problems than what you do with your jimmy. Mental problems, of the sort that only Jesus can fix.

Don't Ask/Don't Tell is a fairly good way to weed out those persons who are so mentally-disordered that they cannot contain their sexual proclivities to off-hours clandestine action like their 'breeder' brothers-in-arms. If a man is schtupping his LT's wife and HAS TO blab about it, he is also unfit for service.

I had never given this serious thought but the conventional arguments around the topic always bothered me. Anti-DADT types tend to be (in my experience) either flamers or rather soft in the head. I never could come up with anything much more than a "What? Who thinks that?" when they erect the straw-man of potential retribution/assaults against queers in the service. Finally it occurred to me: DADT puts a mental check on people who need to be able to deal with mental checks. If you just can't refrain from telling your sergeant you suck [deleted]s, how can we be sure you will be stable under non-peacetime conditions NOT involving your junk? If you're too crazy to keep your crazies to yourself, you NEED to not be in the trenches. It's not that we couldn't deal with the ickyness of serving alongside a friggen homo (other countries' soldiers do so w/ no problem). . .

It's that you HAVE TO come out that's the problem, not that you're out.
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*if we must have a policy at all. Frankly, if we are not going to have an official state church and we refuse to stick to even a basic set of morals, as long as you can keep it zipped up on-duty AND it doesn't interfere with your duties (neither is necessarily a guarantee, by the way) then we, as a country, don't have much of a basis for saying anything one way or another about what you do with your fiddly bits.**

**Longest sentence of the YEAR!