News That Deserves a Real Salute
Forget Eddie Munster - this is where the country is really at, and the repugs can like it or fuck off and die.
A round of applause, everyone! For the first time since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the US Army has promoted an openly gay soldier to the rank of General. Tammy S. Smith was promoted from Colonel to Brigadier General last Friday in a ceremony in Washington D.C.; her wife, Tracey Hepner, affixed Smith’s General’s star to her uniform. Following Congress’s repeal of DADT in December 2010, Smith and Hepner married in March 2011, although the formal end of DADT by the Pentagon wasn’t implemented until September of that year. Despite predictions by the Christian right, the promotion failed to cause Planet Earth to spin out of orbit into the sun.
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1 comment:
I don't think there was anywhere near as much in-service opposition to a DADT repeal as most of the conservative groups claimed. The most vigorous military opposition came from older personnel, many of whom had either spent their careers at the Pentagon or had deployed in very insulated capacity.
The majority of the military were more exasperated at all the time and money used for the DADT debate instead of useful things (R&D, equipment, manpower, fixing the incompetence of the VA, etc.)
The DADT issue began heating up right around the time we were implementing The Surge, the escalation of the two front war, prepping for the handover of Iraq, and stabilizing the security situation in Afghanistan. While there was (and is) hesitation about serving with openly gay personnel, in the end they didn't really care if it meant easing the difficult optempo.
I'm a gay veteran, and even I really didn't care at the time as I had been almost constantly deployed from 2008 to 2010 (I volunteered for both), and was therefore preoccupied with actually working. Most of the others seemed to agree as the military had been in an unbroken cycle of prepping for deployment, two theater deployment, prepping for turnover, and training for the inevitable upcoming deployment from 2007 to the present day. Many of us, myself included, didn't even have a grasp of how bad the global financial meltdown was as we weren't there to see it.
My one concern is how the Army might have killed General Smith's career. The promotion was obviously the result of political machinations (ala Pat Tillman, and Jessica Lynch) on the part of the DoD. So I think that will overshadow her abilities out of suspicion over the board's motivations. This is particularly true with the Army Reserve since promotions as a whole (with high ranking officers being the most affected) are notoriously few and far between.
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