Same sex bennies; DADT was about service
Someone sent us this letter that he received today. It’s dated February, but this is the first I’ve heard about it. Remember that repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy at the Department of Defense was about allowing gays to serve openly without having to “live a lie”;
Throughout history, heterosexual couples weren’t able to sign “a declaration attesting to the existence of their committed relationship” and receive ID cards and the stuff normally attributed to married couples in the military without the benefit of the actual contract associated with marriage. I’m guessing they won’t be able to do that now, either. I’m guessing that’s Panetta’s signature at the bottom. I wonder how Hagel will handle this situation – yet another grenade Panetta tossed to him on the way out the door.
Category: Military issues
Don’t mind me while I go throw up…
I predict this will be reversed before the end of the year. The tax payor cost will be epic..
Special rules once again, if a non-married hetero couple can’t get benefits neither should non-married gay couples. Same treatment means same treatment. If the DoMA is declared unconstitutional and gay can marry anywhere and be recognized federally throughout the nation they would be allowed to marry and benefit the same as hetero couples.
No marriage, no benefits. Not that hard to understand.
I don’t have a problem treating gays the same as everyone else including marriage, I have a huge problem with treating them with special advantage rules. Gays have not been denied education and monetary wealth in the same fashion as blacks, there is no need for an affirmative action plan with gays. Only a removal of barriers to equal treatment, not special, under the law.
A lot of this is about survivor’s benefits when one partner dies. (Sorry, I just can’t say ‘spouse.) Also, some states do not allow anyone but family members to visit dying or seriously ill people at a hospital, and if a gay partner is not recognized by the state as a family member, there are no visitation rights allowed.
I guess now we all have adjustments to make.
Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was all about service, stop it, you are killing me, I can’t breathe from laughing so goddamn hard…..It was all about advancing the gay agenda in the only social engineering area that a liberal progressive president has available to him, the military. And now that the homo’s have their nose under the tent, it is not going to stop. The homosexual lobby (who are not even serving, just advocating for those that are queer and do serve) are going to change curriculum at military schools where they can to reflect a gay point of view. They are going to change promotion rules so that they are better represented in who gets promoted. They are going to insist on as many changes as possible to promote the lifestyle that they have chosen. And they are going to do this because they have our politicians on their side. Cost be damned, this is about equality and diversity!!! They are consolidating on the objective right now after getting DADT repealed. But it is coming.
@3, while your argument is true it lets the left move nicely into the argument of “well then let them get married”
Me, I have no problem with gay marriage – as Kinky Friedman so famously said “why should we be the only ones to suffer?”
But make it the same across the board – marriage, joint taxes penalties, the whole nine yards. None of this “oh, yeah, Bruce is realery and trulery my soulmate now gimme the bennies” crap.
The most effective way to destroy a nation is to destroy its institutions. The most sacred of our institutions is the family, which traditionally begins with the marriage of a man and a woman who later have children. Give me a pole and a white coth. It’s time.
@6 I think that is the right argument to have, the problem with marriage has always been that it is the one place where we really have mixed state and religion. It never should have been that way.
You don’t ask your priest to incorporate your business, nor should religion be a part of joining the assets of two people in a tax and insurance benefit union. The signing of the legal marriage instrument should have always required signatures from laywers to finalize them the same as your mortgage. Nothing would have stopped anyone from going to their church afterwards to have their union recognized….had it been done that way this discussion doesn’t even become cantankerous because it’s a simple legal union devoid of religion.
By mixing religion with state functions at the start we have an unnecessarily contentious discussion, two people joining assets to enjoy a lower tax rate and some health and insurance benefits should be devoid of religious connotations in much the same way starting a business is devoid of religious connotations.
Were that the case each religion could choose to recognize or not recognize same sex partnerships on whatever moral compass they work with and have zero effect on the legality of such unions.
Extending benefits to homosexual couples was not supposed to occur, as federal law does not recognise gay marriage. They cannot simply hand out benefits to a single class of people, in this case un-married “partners” based on their sexual preference. It is now discrimninating against heterosexual couples who chose not to be married.
I concur with VOV on this one. If they’d stop calling it “Marriage” which is a religious term used to describe a couple, we wouldn’t have this issue. “Separation of Church and state, oh, except when it benefits my agenda!”
A very KEY point to why this is a political issue is Panetta APPROVING Military Personnel wearing their uniforms in a Gay Pride Parade shortly after DADT ended (in San Diego I believe?). It wouldn’t be a political issue if not for the politicians involved, even the unelected ones like Panetta.
If I wanted to get really silly, I’d say something like the following:
I cohabitate with 35 fish who depend on me to finance their way of life and their ability to be free of predators. Hence, I will marry my lead fish and call them all dependents for tax purposes and get them all ID cards to use at the PX when they want to go shopping. Why deny animals rights and freedoms? They live with us, depend on us, etc etc. But I’m not going to go there…
Air Cav is correct-the left hates social institutions as they currently exist. Going back to Rousseau and his idiotic “man in a state of nature is pure and good”, “natural man is corrupted by modern society” (i.e. the existing social institutions), which informed the moron Marx and his ideas which are the intellectual foundation of so much of the left today.
They are happy to use any club available to destroy those institutions; a market based economy, limited democratic government, the nuclear family, etc. and homosexual marriage gives them such a cudgel. Polygamy is next, and that is a death sentence for our culture-believe that.
@10 and just think of how many law suits there will be if that happens? “We’ve been together for 10 years, but choose not to marry. However, give us all the benefits.” At the same time, think of how many people will live together JUST for the tax cuts, benefits, etc., that go with it? Will it really be fraud just because they don’t have sexual relations?
@8 Gays don’t destroy marriage or families, open acceptance of infidelity as a new cultural norm destroys marriage and consequently destroys families.
Open acceptance of pre-marital sex without repercussion destroys families by allowing millions of fathers to avoid responsibility for their bastards. Open acceptance of women who fuck multiple partners and produce their multiple bastard children destroys families….as typically these women are undereducated and incapable of adequately caring for and educating their bastards.
Making absentee fathers responsible financially for their inability to self discipline their peckers while fucking some fertile whore whose children you and I will pay for seems a minimum requirement. Making mothers responsible for telling us who they are mating with so we can track these individuals and keep them responsible for their children should also be a no brainer. A society that accepts broken families as a normal course of action should not be surprised to find that three quarters of its minority children are living in a fucked up single family usually with government assistance.
That’s a recipe for disaster that has nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not two gay men or women have access to the legal and taxation benefits of a civil union.
@5 and @8 Thank you. Well said. I can’t add anything better.
@14 Thank you as well.
@6, Come on Air Cav…COL Moore and CSM Plumley didn’t surrender at LZ X-Ray, despite the odds being against them. They couldn’t, and guess what? Neither can we. These ‘social progressivists’ can tear this country to shit, right after I’m toast. And when they finally take it, lets see how long they can hold it before it either collapses or someone else comes in and takes it from since they will have destroyed all who might defend it from within.
So, here’s our plan. We fight. We fight on the beaches. We fight in the schools. We fight in the media. We fight in the Universities and the halls of Congress. We shall never surrender, becasue it’s not an option for us, and if we fail, take as many of those tools down with as we can.
I’ve already estabilshed a personal, one man, beachhead in deep, deep blue Pennsylvania, in a VERY blue academic institution. These ‘progressive’ f%^&@rs want a fight? Let it begin here.
A little off track, but I tangled with the hippies yesterday here on campus and I’m feeling fiesty.
Already plenty of discrimination against heterosexuals. Same-sex military couples have long been allowed to berth together (as long as no one talked about it before, now they can be open). Opposite sex couples may still not share berthing.
I’d say it’s time to get rid of male-/female-only berthing and just be done with it. Go the way the universities did with dorms. What’s the worse that can happen…?
VOV-“Gays don’t destroy marriage or families, open acceptance of infidelity as a new cultural norm destroys marriage and consequently destroys families.”
Those two things are not mutually exclusive to the agenda of destroying the family. Sex outside of the bounds of marriage does undermine one of the traditional functions of the marital bond (as does increased illegitimacy, which is a perfectly predictable consequence), but gay marriage allows the left to redefine what marriage has been-a bond between a man and a woman in which they can cooperatively raise children (which is the one thing that a gay couple cannot do-at least by themselves) along with a host of other social benefits.
Once marriage is redefined away from its traditional meaning the exact same arguments that were used to advance gay marriage will be used to push Polygamy-which is a very different social arrangement. There are many ways to accomplish the goal of destroying marriage and the family-redefining it into meaninglessness is one of those methods.
The family will ultimately survive in some form (the Soviets tried to de-emphasize the primacy of the family in a number of ways and failed), but in the interim there will be a host of problems. I believe-with some justification, I might add-that the nuclear family is of critical importance to a stable society, and so I understand why homosexual couples desire something similar-but I think that radicals are only too willing to use this movement to advance their socially destructive purposes-and I have to fight that.
@20 A lack of responsibility for your offspring destroys families and societies was a point I was trying to press. The definition of what constitutes a baseline family for a society with or without marriage is responsibility or a lack thereof. A responsible gay family is preferable to an irresponsible hetero one. Gay marriage has not been at the fore front of marriage destabilization for the last 40 years, lack of responsibility has. The relaxation of welfare requirements dictating that women name their children’s fathers or receive no benefits has done a great deal of damage by allowing 75% of black fathers to be completely absent financially and physically in many of these cases in their bastard children’s lives. Destigmatization of male absentee fathers or unmarried mothers with multiple children from multiple partners has also contributed. None of these factors has anything to do with how marriage is defined. The failure to hold people responsible for their children has led to a failure to hold them responsible for a great many other aspects of a cohesive society. The push to fragment our society into dozens of tribes of – Americans has done more to erode an assimilated culture of multiple races and origins into a divisive culture of separatist groups unwilling to associate freely with other groups. We are actually less tolerant than before we began all this tolerance bullsh1t…. Gay marriages don’t change the fundamental requirement that each parent needs to be held accountable for their children. Marriages without children have zero effect positive or negative on the family, hetero or gay childless couples are of no concern beyond their ability to achieve home/land ownership through government sponsored tax subsidy. In that regard they benefit society as home ownership stabilizes economies and stabilizes communities. The orderly dissolution through legal remedy of a childless marriage gay or otherwise benefits society as well. Legalizing and applying appropriate financial benefits and financial cost upon dissolution of alternative marriages could in fact stabilize relationships where children are being raised cooperatively, either by a man and a woman or two gay people male or… Read more »
VOV–
I’ve been saying exactly what you did…tolerance of behaviors that were once taboo…out-of-wedlock pregnancy, divorce, welfare, food stamps (as a temp fix, not the way people use it to live as a job)– you name it. The more we have accepted these things as the “norm” of self-expression the more we have become politically correct. And when the office of President gets away with lying because of fornication and people accepted it without real retribution, the more fucked up things have become. Oh, how I fear for my children and theirs.
@17: I’m ‘blue’ on things like gay rights / sexual proclivities (and ‘red’ on things like national security, hence why I’m here), and maybe it’s just this bias talking,.. but you’ve already lost the war on gay marriage. Younger generations, even amongst people identifying as conservatives, are generally for allowing gay marriage. With gay people being more ‘out’, a lot of people know at least one personally now, and when you do, it’s hard to justify the government not giving them the same (civil) rights as straight people. (What churches do is up to them, in my opinion.)
As for kids, if two sensible adults who happen to be of the same sex get married and adopt kids and raise them well? Great, that’s a few less kids in foster care / government programs and with parents in their lives. I’m totally fine with that.
@17 Amen. I stand armed, figuratively and literally.
VOV-I think you’re right when you say that the abdication of responsibility that we have seen in our culture is a serious problem, and the root of a variety of social problems (and I think that the left is defined by the saying that they are “outraged about everything, but responsible for nothing”). But I think you are wrong when you say “None of these factors has anything to do with how marriage is defined”. Of course it has to do with how marriage is defined. Culture has to do with shared assumptions about acceptable behavior. You have, rightly enough, touched on how so many of our problems are a consequence of fatherlessness, but the issue at hand is why that is so. Why should we expect young men to invest in marriage when so many prevailing social forces are hostile to his involvement? Do you know that women file for divorce twice as often as men? And of course it is common knowledge that family courts are, well let’s just say, not the friendliest of venues for men. Dad is commonly portrayed as an idiot in popular culture and the list goes on. What we have gotten away from is the idea that marriage, particularly heterosexual marriage, is a great social good and especially something that men should invest themselves into. Young men get the message pretty clearly-there is nothing particularly special about traditional marriage and in fact such a relationship could be ruinous for him. Until these issues can be addressed the resultant social problems will continue. Right now I believe that gay marriage is being used as a cudgel to undermine traditional marriage by those who would destroy our social institutions. They are attempting to further undermine the traditional concept of marriage and their path forward seems clear enough. For instance, right now there are indications that lesbians are availing themselves of the opportunity to marry much more so than gay men http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/guys_reluctant_to_say_do_RydPUmKHqalYq5NYAX6IjM that will certainly skew the way that “gay marriage” is understood and cited for sociological and political/legal purposes, imagine the propaganda implications vis-a-vis things… Read more »
“Legalizing and applying appropriate financial benefits and financial cost upon dissolution of alternative marriages could in fact stabilize relationships…”
One more thing-I don’t think that will be what actually happens. The left seeks exceptions for its favored groups and accuses anyone who opposes that of what applicable “phobia” serves their particular purpose. Right now there is a case of an 18 year old woman in Florida who was having a sexual relationship with a 14 year old girl. She has been charged with statutory rape-the same as an 18 year old man would if he were having sex with a 14 year old girl (and they regularly are). The difference is that there is a huge outcry that the girls parents are motivated solely by “homophobia” and there is a “free whatever her name is” (I honestly don’t remember) movement.
Equality means something entirely different to you and I than it does to the commissars of the left.
VOV – I agree with everything you’ve stated. I also believe it applies to polygamy as well, as long as they’re not sucking off the government teat for support. I think it’s far better to have a man with multiple wives supporting many children in the same household than a man sowing his wild oats all over creation with no responsibility attached.
It really comes down to our tax system. Marriage is a legal contract that can be duplicated by any two or more people, except for the tax deductions. Flatten and simplify the tax structure and separate a religious marriage from legal marriage the way parts of Europe do (see Monaco).
Insurance benefits are also skewed by having employers provide them, giving us arbitrary rules like “children up to age 26”. Do employers provide car insurance? Our car insurance covers everyone in our household regardless of age or relationship and we manage and pay for it ourselves.
Take the government and the employer out of marriage and out of insurance benefits and you solve most of the problem.
Polygamy is a stream we should never cross. In almost every instance “polygamy” (many spouses) will mean “polygyny” (many wives) and not “polyandry” (many husbands). There are anthropological surveys that looked at 1000 different instances of marital relationships across cultures and in less than 1% of cases was polyandry even practiced (I think something like 6 out of 1000).
There is already an imbalance of males to females that occurs naturally (for every 100 females born there are 104 males). X number of males and females will be gay (there doesn’t seem to be any agreement about the percentage, so I won’t try to say what it is with any authority), but not enough to correct for the imbalance. That means that there will be more opportunity for women to enter into a marital relationship and reap the benefits-polygamy only exacerbates that.
Look into polygamous societies and you will see that there is always the problem of “surplus males”, and men who have little or no prospect of entering into a stabilizing marital relationship will almost always cause problems.
@28 no argument here about polygamy….
Regarding surplus males, I would suggest that population density of males versus females is only slanted towards males at birth to about 34….after that women start to outnumber men pretty quickly. There are 5 million more females than men in the US from the 2010 census numbers. At my age there 600,000 more women than men….if I can last long enough there will be plenty of surplus females for me….if we disallow male immigrants we can lower that swing point age for you younger fellows…
Here’s a positive note: once ze gheys get their hands on spousal TriCare, we can make it a matter of ghey-discrimination when they start talking premium hikes.
VOV-I have a 2 o’clock tee time, so I won’t be able to continue any discussion until after 5 some time. I apologize in advance for my lack of responsiveness until then.
100 percent agree with VOV #3
@17. I meant every word I wrote. The pole is to stick someone and the white cloth is to wipe my hands when I’m done!
I just read in “The Way of the Knife” by Mark Mazzetti(page 228) that Panetta was a devout Catholic (see http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Knife-Secret-Earth/dp/1594204802 ). Really.