Don't ask, don't tell...

I was reading CNN and I found the following:

Pentagon: Letting openly gay troops serve won't hurt military

I've never served in the military (or wanted to for that matter). My biological father was in the military for a while and so was my step-dad back in the motherland--hey, maybe my mom had a thing for men in uniform, I'll have to sass her about that someday!!--I also have a relative who is in the service and just came back from Afghanistan, as far as I know he is not gay; he's married, him and his wife are pretty conservative--still who is to say right? :-)

A few years ago I was taking an Ethics class we had some debates assigned and this was one of the topics assigned to our group. It just so happened that there was a very openly gay guy in my class as well as someone who was a National Guard and was about to be sent into active duty and they were in opposite sides of the debate. Once we got down to presenting facts and ideas, these two exchanged ideas back and forth, rebuttals and so forth. Finally the professor asked everyone in the room (maybe around 20 people) if they thought that a gay person--openly or closeted for that matter--could serve effectively in the military.  The answers were about evenly split--kind of surprising even for Utah.

The last person that was asked was the soldier who had kind of argued his point, but had not really made a solid case. He took a deep sigh and said something like this: "As much as I tried to look for reasons, I could not find a convincing one why ****** could not serve in the military whether in the closet or openly". HOWEVER, he said that he personally believed that this was more the case in war times (we were deep in the Iraq war) when the Armed Forces needed every possible volunteer to help out. He said that he seriously doubted that he'd feel the same if we were not at war as a country.

Of course none of the above mentioned items qualifies me as an expert, this is just my opinion, but I honestly don't see why a gay soldier could not do his job as effectively as the next person. I don't even understand why it is even being debated in the US Senate right now. Is is that the military is the last sacred cow for people? Are gay servicemen less patriotic than their counterparts? Someone explain it please...

Just my  $.02