Am I the only queer person in the country that is sad about the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell"? The long-delayed bill just signed into law has destroyed my plan to avoid any future military conscription.

Let me explain. Many of my male friends in college photodocumented their participation in pacifist activities.  They explained that this was their insurance policy against any eventual military draft: solid proof to support a history of conscientious objection.  As a queer person, I had another plan, though:  If anyone tried to compel me to serve in the military, before anyone could even "ask," I planned to "tell" by yelling, "I'm gay, and not in the happy way!" loudly and repeatedly, until no branch of the military would want me. Just for extra measure I would threaten to convert any and all women that I ran across.

Now, in the wake of another victory for queer rights in this country, it seems silly to not have taken pictures of myself at anti-war protests anyway.

But I have mixed feelings about the repeal of DADT for other reasons, too.  With queer folks now allowed to serve openly, it seems that yet another oppressed minority group has been pulled into being exploited by the American military-industrial complex.

Recently one of my previous blogs was fortunate enough to be posted on both thiscantbehappening.net (progressive online news collective) and opednews.com.  I feel the need to share one of the hilarious anecdotes from the comments:

"NOTE: I remember getting a huge text book on Ob-Gyn from my sister in law the pediatritian when my wife got pregnant the first time. My wife was looking through the index, finding out about all these scary things that might happen to her fetus (none did, thankfully!), and she came to the index term "Sexism". The Index entry was "Sexism: prodigious quantities of, pp 1-1069." That was the number of pages in the book.

It was pretty funny when you think about it. The indexer must have been a woman, and whoever did this entry was making a good joke and also a political comment about a classic work edited by to men. We wondered how many editions the entry had made it through. But clearly the problem is real."
-Dave Lindorff, founder of thiscantbehappening.net