on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

so, with the latest shenanigans in the Senate, the United States has renewed its lack of commitment to civil rights, as well as reaffirming that our nation holds little stock in the Declaration of Independence's absurd claim that "all men are created equal." sadly, this sort of jack-assery has been the status quo for more than thirty years now, ever since Anita Bryant's 1977 "Save the Children" campaign started to turn back the tide of civil rights advances that began in the 1950s.

an interesting story in and of itself, but this is beside the point.

the point is that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is just plain weird to me – not because its homophobic, but because it poses interesting philosophical implications. specifically, the United States Army finds homosexuality ontologically acceptable, but epistemologically problematic. in other words:

it's okay to be, but not to know

what type of fear, what type of desire could be driving this logic ? prejudice and bigotry are the easy answers, but i believe it goes deeper than that. by accepting homosexuality on ontological grounds, our nation is able to keep believing its creation story and the myth of the American Dream. we like to think of ourselves as a freedom-loving nation, and 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' allows us some measure of (im)plausible deniability that allows us to hold onto our much vaunted, poorly practiced history of equality for all citizens.

but what about knowledge? why is knowing homosexuality so threatening?

as far as i can tell, it's rooted in our society's schizophrenic relationship with sexuality in general, and homosexuality in specific. our nation seems positively terrified by the notion that love, that romance, that sexual expression exists along a continuum rather than huddled around the twin poles of straight and gay. this, of course, is built upon our backwards notion of masculine and feminine, which appears to have been institutionalized thousands of years before Watson and Crick taught us that there are many more chromosomal configurations than just XX and XY.

what if we thought of our beings as a mix of yin and yang, of creation and dissolution, of ebb and flow, of this-ness and such-ness, rather than man and woman?

... and never the two shall meet

at some level the armed forces seems to know this, and 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is proof of it. if soldiers were allow to serve as openly gay, it would throw the whole of gender binarism into utter disarray. it would require the Army to give up the misogyny that equates (and equivocates) masculinity with violence. it would require our entire society to acknowledge what is already true: each of us is gay, each of us is straight, each of us contains an entire universe of possibilities inside.