M
MAquino
Guest
This morning President Trump tweeted his decision to ban "transgenders" (TG) in the military. This will obviously evoke a firestorm from TG advocates. [Politically, to be sure, Trump is "crazy like a fox": The Democrats concluded that one of the reasons Hillary punted the election was her conspicuous advocacy of TG, i.e. the "bathrooms" issue. If Trump takes an anti-TG position now, the Democratic Tump-haters are forced to aggressively champion TG, which if voter opinion repeats itself will damage them at the 2018 ballot box.]
All is not lost for the Dems, however: The Prez has also denied servicemen Viagra. All the next Democratic nominee has to do for electoral landslide is promise to restore it. [Is this a great country or what?]
But beyond this political theater there is the more general question of sexuality in the American military. From WW2 to the present there have been several policy changes, often with considerable emotion. The changes have been inexorably in the direction of more toleration and inclusion on any sexual criteria from basic gender to personal expression. SOF is the most arduous and dangerous component of the military; hence it is here that these developments are the most impactful and controversial.
I haven't come across an existing thread that addresses the entire topic. [There's one about females in SOF, but that seems to focus on one woman' Ranger School graduation, which is just one manifestation of the overall question.]
So the concept of this thread is to examine the entire topic: how it got to this point and whether all or part of it should be changed [back, forward, or ?].
I'm a post-WW2 Baby Boomer. I grew up in the Walt Disney "Eisenhower 50s", then saw all the traditional values attacked in the counterculture 60s. It began as anti- Jim Crow racial racial activism, and the passion for anti-dicrimination spilled over into "women's lib" as well. It was no longer acceptable for women to aspire "just" to be wives and mothers a la Harriet Nelson. This was demeaning, servile, even shameful. Now women had to have breadwinning careers, and that meant competing with men. Any "males only" restriction was a threat, an insult to be overcome.
Exascerbating this was the steady erosion of real incomes. In the 1950s a man could make enough to support wife & children. In 2017 both spouses must work, and even then it's precarious.
All of this placed tremendous stress on traditional male & female roles. Men's feelings of inadequacy to be "Ozzie Nelsons" resulted in unstable marriages, non-marriage relationships, and homosexuality. Women simultaneously became more independent & self-reliant, and access to birth control & abortion freed them from being reproductively enslaved to their bodies. Male abandonment of masculinity and female assertion of it resulted eventually in today's affectation of "TG". Only a few years ago such an assertion would have been preposterous; now we find one President (Obama) endorsing it, and the next one (Trump) rejecting it. Once again the American military finds itself the "social laboratory", because it's locked to the Constitution more directly and tightly than national society generally.
So where do we go from here? This opening-post is already overlong, so I'll pause here ...
All is not lost for the Dems, however: The Prez has also denied servicemen Viagra. All the next Democratic nominee has to do for electoral landslide is promise to restore it. [Is this a great country or what?]
But beyond this political theater there is the more general question of sexuality in the American military. From WW2 to the present there have been several policy changes, often with considerable emotion. The changes have been inexorably in the direction of more toleration and inclusion on any sexual criteria from basic gender to personal expression. SOF is the most arduous and dangerous component of the military; hence it is here that these developments are the most impactful and controversial.
I haven't come across an existing thread that addresses the entire topic. [There's one about females in SOF, but that seems to focus on one woman' Ranger School graduation, which is just one manifestation of the overall question.]
So the concept of this thread is to examine the entire topic: how it got to this point and whether all or part of it should be changed [back, forward, or ?].
I'm a post-WW2 Baby Boomer. I grew up in the Walt Disney "Eisenhower 50s", then saw all the traditional values attacked in the counterculture 60s. It began as anti- Jim Crow racial racial activism, and the passion for anti-dicrimination spilled over into "women's lib" as well. It was no longer acceptable for women to aspire "just" to be wives and mothers a la Harriet Nelson. This was demeaning, servile, even shameful. Now women had to have breadwinning careers, and that meant competing with men. Any "males only" restriction was a threat, an insult to be overcome.
Exascerbating this was the steady erosion of real incomes. In the 1950s a man could make enough to support wife & children. In 2017 both spouses must work, and even then it's precarious.
All of this placed tremendous stress on traditional male & female roles. Men's feelings of inadequacy to be "Ozzie Nelsons" resulted in unstable marriages, non-marriage relationships, and homosexuality. Women simultaneously became more independent & self-reliant, and access to birth control & abortion freed them from being reproductively enslaved to their bodies. Male abandonment of masculinity and female assertion of it resulted eventually in today's affectation of "TG". Only a few years ago such an assertion would have been preposterous; now we find one President (Obama) endorsing it, and the next one (Trump) rejecting it. Once again the American military finds itself the "social laboratory", because it's locked to the Constitution more directly and tightly than national society generally.
So where do we go from here? This opening-post is already overlong, so I'll pause here ...
