Facebook's Fight Against Child Abuse Weekend

I started noticing some of my FB peeps changing their profile pictures through Monday in the fight against child abuse. At first I fought the urge to jump on he bandwagon and this is the reason why:

My mother and my older sister think that someone sexually abused me as a kid, which is why I'm gay....

Well nothing could be further than the truth. I don't remember being sexually abused. Certainly by now in my 40's the memory as much as I would have tried to regress it would have found its way to resurge. I am not a professional in this field, but I certainly think I know myself well enough. Still studies (and I'm sorry I don't have references, this is just a blog post, not a college paper!) say that most of the child abusers are: 1. Heterosexual 2. Someone that the child knows and trusts.

Now I don't discount the fact that a lot of gay men were sexually abused as children. I've heard lots of pretty horrific stories about being abused by older brothers, cousins, uncles, neighbors, scoutmasters, etc. Still save a couple of the men who attribute it directly to the sexual abuse, most of the men say that the abuse in itself was/is not the wild card to their sexuality. This topic may have been brought up in blogs before: Is it nature or is it nurture?

Is it that gay boys have a tendency not to be overbearing that makes them ideal targets for abusers or is it the 'exploring' nature that makes them experiment?  This may be overreaching, but I believe that there's a big difference between sitting in a tent with a bunch (or one or two) of other teenagers all in their underwear and suddenly a wrestling match turns into something else OR as one of my friends explained (GRAPHIC WARNING HERE!): Being startled from sleep with the scoutmaster's penis in his mouth---Now that's sexual abuse!!

Other less graphic theories may include the lack of closeness to a male father figure, well I had plenty of those around, lots of church leaders, uncles, cousins and certainly my stepdad. I've talked about our relationship (or lack of) on this blog in the past but as far as I can I had no lack of access to manly role models. Others may say that I was raised with too many females around (growing up with 7 sisters might be a qualifier) and yeah I did learn to make french braids and the side pony tail on the Barbie--LOL-- but then again: So did my brother and he is not gay!! While I believe that the nurture theory does play somewhat of a role in someone's gayness--and again, I'm not a professional so take it for what it is-- in my mind role of nature has to be the clincher here.

Now this just about sexual abuse. I do believe that emotional abuse can probably be just as scarring and by no means it is less damaging to a child's psyche. This is ultimately why this morning I thought that abuse is abuse and a child should never have to live through any of it, so I joined in and changed my profile picture, I just had to think it over a few hours, sleep on it if you may.

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