I don't believe you completed your thought there. How is noting that gay men have more illicit, often anonymous, sexual encounters a contradiction of not wanting them in the military?

Two men or two women? What are the circumstances of the pregnancy? Do they know the mother? How old is she? Will she be around to help raise the child? Where is the father? Among many other questions.



By your phrasing, it's not a done deal yet. So there's that. But it doesn't piss me off, so much as it raises concerns. Twenty years down the line, if they've turned the kid gay, then I'd be pissed off.

Well, I'm not gonna defend such assholery, but a military needs officers, and it helps if senior officers have experience.

My father is a West Point graduate, but he chose to leave the Army rather than make a career of it. I think he might have made captain before he quit. He observed that colonel was the highest rank where you might find a decent human being. At that point, the battle was on for a star, then two stars, and so on. Dad said there may be a general somewhere who wasn't a scheming, ambitious prick, but he never met that general.

On a sidenote, a few years ago I attended a West Point reunion with Dad. Many of his classmates (now in their 70s) became generals in middle age and then retired and earned a fortune as "consultants" for defense contractors, selling crap to their old friends back at the Pentagon, some of which even worked and wasn't totally overpriced. We attended the reunion at the north Virginia estate of one such consultant, a beautiful, sprawling and gated compound on the Potomac River not far from Washington. Your tax dollars at work.

I think you know what I was getting at.

I don't think you can "turn" someone gay.

I think you're attracted to whom you're attracted to.

In my case, it's always been women.

There are gay men who say just the opposite, that even from a young age, they were attracted to other boys and never felt drawn to women, even if they grew up in a family of heterosexual men, in a small, rural community where homosexuality was not publicly observed.

I knew a girl once, raised by her mother and her mother's lesbian partner, and that girl was heterosexual. She liked boys. That's who she was.

Maybe this is an issue you struggle with in your head, where you're supposed to stick your Li'l Allen, but for the rest of us, it's what comes natural.

You can't "turn" someone gay, but you can turn someone into a homophobe.

And I think you're wrong. Even proponents of the "gay gene" theory admit that there are environmental factors to the decision. Freud's primary theory on the origins of homosexuality had to do with early childhood trauma. "Early childhood trauma" used to mean only serious things like sexual molestation or some other kind of physical abuse, but nowadays there are so many more sensory input channels — TV, the Internet, etc. — that allow children to essentially be traumatized by proxy.

You can turn someone into a critical thinker and careful citizen? Good to know, good to know.

Funny how no one wanted to talk about paperless voting machines.

It falls under the same category as "Holy Shit! Airplanes!" People of the sixties would probably look at paperless voting machines and say, "wait, they can do that?!?"

They'd probably also be amazed at this global computer network, which provides public forums where people all over the world can say "homophobia is the result of critical thinking" and "TV turns you gay" in the same breath with a straight face.

HOW FAR TECHNOLOGY HAS COME!