The Democrats spent several minutes tonight during the presidential debate talking about the issue of gay civil rights. Hillary was asked about the US military ban on gay service members - she supports letting gay service members serve. She spoke at length about the topic, clearly knew the issue well, even talked about the Arabic-speaking military linguists who were just fired for being gay. She did a good job. She clearly wanted to show that she wasn't afraid of embracing a gay civil rights issue - she could have simply said she opposed the current policy and moved on, but instead she spoke at length. Having said that, she concluded by talking about "conduct problems" and how gays would still have to abide by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Only problem with that is the UCMJ basically says that gay service members can't have sex, ever, with anyone, even their partners or spouses in the privacy of their own homes. And actually, the UCMJ is worse than that - it says that none of our soldiers, gay or straight, can have oral or anal sex, period, with anyone, same or opposite sex, even their married spouses (really). That is absolutely absurd, incredibly archaic, and offensive. My concern is that the UCMJ may still be disproportionately used against gays, as it is now. In any case, Hillary gave a good answer, and I suspect her "conduct" addendum was meant to address the concerns the wingers have about those crazy gays peeking at all the hot Marines in the showers - she was in essence saying that all soldiers, gay and straight, will still be required to follow the same code of conduct, thus the concerns are invalid.
