I’m Back And So Is My Soap-Box

Okay, I've taken off a couple of weeks to play video games and junk and now I'm back.

This is in response to a good friend's response to a post of mine urging President Obama to reverse our military’s 'don't-ask-don't-tell' policy.

First, let’s get the preachiest sentence out of the way from the get-go. Equality is not a social experiment.

Okay, the rest of this entry gets about thirty percent less pompous and forty percent less vainglorious from here, I promise.

Animal Collective is excellent. If you aren’t already a fan, seek them out.

Second, from what I have read, the military has not been keeping their part, the don’t ask part, of the bargain. But that is incidental.

The question becomes, is it right to demand silence from the men and women who serve our country?

Why is it that I can say anything in the world with impunity while our service men and women have to shut up?

I have never served partly because of ideological reasons and partly because I don't have the balls.

So, I think that our troops are at the very least entitled to the same freedoms that we take for granted under the first amendment.

And lastly, I do understand that there is a difference between racial prejudice and prejudice against homosexuals, but it is prejudice nevertheless.

Every civil rights struggle in every period of history in every region of the world has looked and behaved differently.

Injustice ranges in nature from beating down ideas and art to economic oppression to genocide, simple murder, rape and everything in between.

Sometimes these fights are won in centuries, sometimes they take days.

Sometimes the solutions are peaceful, tragically, sometimes they are not.

But one thing that every single one of these fights have in common is that they are worth fighting.

There is value in ending prejudice no matter where we find it, and no matter what form it comes in.