[Insert sailor joke here]

The UK has begun actively recruiting gays into the Navy.

Now, if the gay-baiting right in the US is correct, it's just a matter of time before all their ships sink, right?

And when they don't, the gay-baiting right will abandon its objection to gays in the military...right?

From The Guardian:

It is a liaison that would once have turned many military top brass purple with rage. Five years after the ban on homosexuality in the armed forces was lifted, the Royal Navy is entering into a partnership with Stonewall and actively seeking gay recruits by advertising in the pink press.
Subject to smutty innuendo ever since Churchill supposedly dismissed Britain's naval tradition as "nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash", the navy will today cast off centuries of repression and inhibition by seeking Stonewall's advice on the recruitment and retention of gay and lesbian sailors. In a transformation likened by activists to turning round a supertanker, the navy will pay the pressure group for advice on curbing prejudice and ensuring gay personnel have equal rights to housing, benefits and pensions.

Damn right.

Britain is our most reliable and competent military ally at the moment (not that they get any points for that at the moment). British military personnel are routinely engaged in joint operations with US forces (granted this is the least true for naval personnel, since a given sailor generally stays on his or her own ship). As more and more gay men and women proudly and openly serve in Her Majesty's Navy, American soldiers and sailors will be continually confronted by observations that controvert the party line against gays serving in the military.

Call me Pollyanna, but it seems that once the heterosexual majority in the armed services have served alongside a gay minority, and seen with their own eyes that gay people make good soldiers too, real reform can't be far behind. It happened with the white majority and black minority after World War II. There are atheists in foxholes, and there will probably always be racists, too, but we've had a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — in other words, a reform of this magnitude really happened once before, and it happened after a group that had once been explicitly excluded from serving with the majority was allowed in to show what they were made of.

I love this story because it's a reminder that no matter how bad things are at home, somewhere something is usually getting better.

getBlogName(); > getCategoryName("C793628462"); >

[Insert sailor joke here]

> >