After having a conversation at work today in which we talked about "OMG! SURPRZE! Baby in ur pantz!" and whether people were "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob" (keeping in mind that the gender ratio was still 60-40 in favor of the guys), I decided that I would post about something most decidedly NOT silly.
And what is decidedly NOT silly is the fact that in regards to the Haiti earthquake and the relief efforts it seems as if some people are forgetting that children are not dogs. While they may be cute, and cuddly and fit well in a kennel; small children do not qualify as dogs and therefore you shouldn't just walk around a disaster-ravaged country picking up children all willy-nilly regardless of whether said children have parents who are still alive*. Children still qualify as people and perhaps, instead of transporting them out of the country (without the benefit of having a picture taken, being microchipped, and placed on a national website for the lost...wait, damn, that was the dogs!), one should attempt to help the country itself so that it may one day be able to take care of its own children. Besides, how big of a leap is it from "They're helping our children by taking them to a different country!" to "They're stealing our babies!"? And then where would we be? Somewhere not good. That's where.
*Oh great, now I have this silly scenario running through my head and it's totally like the scene in Old School where Vaughn, Wilson, and Farrell are 'kidnapping' the fraternity recruits and they go for the guy with his wife in the parking lot of the grocery store where they get the guy, then promise the wife that he'll be home before midnight and ultimately take all the snack foods that were just purchased, while this poor lady, who doesn't know what hit her, just stands there quietly freaking out.
Also, I read about the top brass in the military wanting to do away with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which I'm fine with, but are the people in the trenches okay with that? I mean it's been fairly recently that women have been allowed in the "trenches" and there are accounts of that not going so well (like here). Do I think that it's going to go any better with gays being allowed to be open about their sexual orientation? Not unless said person is a woman. I guess I could ask all the military and ex-military people I have as friends on facebook, but that would require work...and the assumption that those guys would actually respond (yeah, I'm sorely lacking on knowing any women in the military). But I do wonder...
4 comments:
I'm pretty rabid about this issue, actually. The way I see it, the military is the ONLY major industry that would even consider its employees feelings about allowing gays and lesbians to be their coworkers. It's absurd. To me it's the same thing as going into a bank, asking the tellers "hey, do you mind working with colored people?" and then refusing to hire blacks if a teller is uncomfortable with it.
The same thing goes for gay marriage. It's NOT OKAY for a country as "advanced" as the United States to allow discrimination against an entire group of people. It astonishes me and sickens me that it's been allowed to perpetuate, and that we haven't treated anti-gay sentiment with the same wild disapproval that we now treat anti-minority sentiment.
Basically, I say that they shouldn't be given a choice, and that they should crack down on any type of discrimination. A "union" of GLBT soldiers could handle any accusations of discrimination, lest it be swept under the rug by high-ranking officers who use their right wing bigotry as an excuse to allow abuse of their subordinates.
Gah. This makes me too angry (not your post, but the issue in general).
Yeah, I know. It just doesn't necessarily seem like a good idea to drop a gay man amongst a bunch of manly men with too much tetosterone who have lots of guns. That being said, man up about it, jeez! You can't catch "gay", and chances are pretty good he doesn't like you either. So yeah, let the gays serve in the military, let the gays get married, and let the gays adopt kids. I also like to think that all the people I know who were/are in the military would be fine with gays serving...but honestly I can think of two or three that would possibly be totally against it. But out of the ten or so I know, that's probably about the same ratio of the citizenry who are dead set against gays being treated equally.
My belief is that you should not do anything in another country that you wouldn't do in your own. Of course then you should abide by their customs out of respect too. People from the US treating people in 3rd world countries different than their neighbors is just wrong.
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