Why DADT Repeal Matters II

A reader writes:

What are the fundamentalists going to do when out GLBT service members begin earning commendations and awards for bravery?  Imagine the first gay soldier being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. It will forever destroy one of fundamentalism's most cherished and nurtured stereotypes, that GLBT folk are weak and craven. Military protocol requires that the entire chain of command, including Commander in Chief salutes anybody wearing that medal.  What a thrill.  I will rejoice when I someday see a President Gingrich or a President Huckabee humiliated into putting that medal around the neck of a towering, heroic, gay man.

That's precisely why so many Christianists resist this. Because it means that the most heroic American icon - the American soldier - would be revealed as gay. The Christianists cannot compute that (although many Christians, especially Catholics, can). For those who have no real interaction with real live gay people, there is an assumption that gay people are sick, perverted, miserable, and anti-American. They simply cannot bear this lie to be disproven in such an irrefutable way. So they struggle to sustain other people's closets to make their own white-knuckled and ignorant beliefs more plausible to themselves.

In the end, I believe, their heads will explode - but with the truth. Which is a good thing. God cannot be in conflict with truth. And maybe Christianity can be reborn in America through a series of such truth-eruptions.

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