That strikes me as nothing but an excuse for homophobia. After all, they don’t have a rule that says you can’t be an intelligence officer if you’re cheating on your wife.[/quote]
So “we shouldn’t put easily compromised people in intelligence positions” is precisely the same thing as “I hate gays”. Thanks for clearing that up dude! I guess it turns out that I hate gamblers, drinkers, druggies, and foreign nationals as well![/quote]
Gays aren’t necessarily easily compromised though. Everyone could be blackmailed for something.
Erm, is the circular logic of “we’ll fire you if you’re gay because you can be blackmailed if we’ll fire you if you’re gay” that hard to figure out? The only reason to keep it secret & be potentially blackmailed is that the military will come after you for it. Note this is different from every other example given - in all of the other cases, there’s a third party you don’t want to find out, leaving you subject to blackmail even without government security clearence issues.
I guess if you want to retain “no closet cases” as a security clearance issue, ok, but “no out homosexuals” is a crime against logic.
That’s true, everyone can be compromised. Thus the reason for 6 month minumum background checks for security clearances, personal interviews with a candidates past neighbors and freinds, etc. Any many intelligence people on every side have been turned over the years for reason of ideology, money, and aprobation instead of “personal secrets” (of which homosexuality is only one). That doesn’t mean you are making a great judgment call allowing people with known gambling problems, or known money problems, or known sympathies with opposing governments into your intelligence organizations.
Hey if homosexuality wasn’t such a taboo, it wouldn’t be an effective blackmail tool. I agree! But the fact is that right now, it is.
Actually, that sentence is hard as a motherfucker to figure out. So to answer your question, yes.
It isn’t a crime against logic. Where do you come up with these bizarre phrases? That sentence you wrote above is a “crime against logic”, or against good writing style at least.
This is just a statement of the state of affairs. By the way it goes beyond the military into “civilian” intelligence service as well. It even goes into civilians industry that works for or with the government. I imagine over the next 20 years it will become less and less of an issue as society grows out of old ideas about homosexuality. But the USSR/CIS and USA were still using it as a tool of espionage less than 15 years ago.
No, he’s got a good point. If the stated reason for not allowing homosexuals in the military is that they can be blackmailed over it, why can’t open homosexuals be allowed in? I mean, it’s incredibly hard to blackmail someone over something that’s public knowledge anyway, right?
I think you’re being overly generous with what it means to be “out”, although again this isn’t just in military environments. A good agent wouldn’t just threaten to “tell the guys in your unit”. You’re talking about severe embarassment here. Generally something that would include provocation (such as the agent hiring a gay prostitute toreally lay it on you), leading to a human lapse of judgement taking place in, say, a hotel room with a video camera. Then threatening to send the video of you in action to parents, relatives, employers, etc.
It is just as compromising as any other perceived flaw. Unless and until society at large no longer sees it as a flaw, it will be an effective tool for espionage, in my view.
Hey asshat. If someone filmed a guy boning some Moscow hooker and sent it home to their parents and family and employer, it wouldn’t have nearly the impact if it were with another guy.
To wit, the last sentence of my previous post: “It is just as compromising as any other perceived flaw. Unless and until society at large no longer sees it as a flaw, it will be an effective tool for espionage, in my view.”
You are now in the negative with your political capital.
It really doesn’t though. Even someone who is “openly gay” to anyone who asks still doesn’t generally hang up a sign to tell their sexual orientation with all their neighbors, with the bank that gave them a home loan, with the local police that theoretically protect them, etc. Even if they are “openly gay” to all their friends and family, spreading the news throughout the community can still be used to humiliate and spur hate crimes. That is absolutely true until American culture in general attaches no stigma to homosexuality. And we are far from that point sadly.
I do see your point, but the U.S. govt can’t try to look that finely at shades of grey on something as critical as security clearances. If someone is gay, take away the clearance. It’s not a moral judgement, just a practical admission that this person might (might, not necessarilly will) be susceptible to pressure in some aspect of their personal life.
I do see your point, but the U.S. govt can’t try to look that finely at shades of grey on something as critical as security clearances. If someone is gay, take away the clearance. It’s not a moral judgement, just a practical admission that this person might (might, not necessarilly will) be susceptible to pressure in some aspect of their personal life.[/quote]
That’s certainly a viable concept, but where does it end? Who is not susceptible to pressure in some aspect of their personal life? I know there’s tons of stuff in my personal life I’d rather not have discussed, and none of those things involve homosexual tendencies.
It ends somewhere reasonable? Perfection must give way to practicality. In a perfect world every single detail of a persons life and personality could be finely weighed before granting a security clearance. Of course that’s not feasible so instead they look for certain high-percentage danger signals like massive debts or a gambling problem or whatnot that indicate a person might have problems or vulnerabilities in their personal life that make them susceptible to pressure. It’s not a perfect system but it’s a good way to work within the realm of the possible and practical.
It ends somewhere reasonable? Perfection must give way to practicality. In a perfect world every single detail of a persons life and personality could be finely weighed before granting a security clearance. Of course that’s not feasible so instead they look for certain high-percentage danger signals like massive debts or a gambling problem or whatnot that indicate a person might have problems or vulnerabilities in their personal life that make them susceptible to pressure. It’s not a perfect system but it’s a good way to work within the realm of the possible and practical.[/quote]
Or it’s another load of b.s. to justify and engender homophobia and bigotry. Tomato, tomahto. If it was so important to know things like that, the policy wouldn’t be “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
It ends somewhere reasonable? Perfection must give way to practicality. In a perfect world every single detail of a persons life and personality could be finely weighed before granting a security clearance. Of course that’s not feasible so instead they look for certain high-percentage danger signals like massive debts or a gambling problem or whatnot that indicate a person might have problems or vulnerabilities in their personal life that make them susceptible to pressure. It’s not a perfect system but it’s a good way to work within the realm of the possible and practical.[/quote]
Or it’s another load of b.s. to justify and engender homophobia and bigotry. Tomato, tomahto. If it was so important to know things like that, the policy wouldn’t be “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”[/quote]
So you are seriously of the opinion that being a homosexual in the military does not expose one to a greater risk of pressure? That the military just cleverly slipped that into the rules to persecute gays?
Back in the 1950s, yes, I can see how that made sense as a security clearance issue. But it’s not the 1950s anymore, and it’s generally not a blackmailable category anymore.
That’s not actually what I said. What I said was, they put it in place to JUSTIFY the persecution of gays. Rather than dealing with the issue, they put rules in place that allow them to sweep it under the carpet. “Pay no attention to the fundamentalist values behind our honorable band of liberators.”
I think that if the military was as honorable, not to mention as desperate for warm bodies, as you claim else-thread, they’d certainly not let a little thing like cornholing or getting cornholed disqualify someone from service. If soldiers followed orders and respected the CoC as you claim they do and should do, then certainly they wouldn’t, say, beat the shit out of someone with bars of soap in pillowcases. Certainly that never happens. Surely if a gay soldier stands up and announces that he’s being blackmailed, he’ll recieve fair treatment and support, and not be drubbed out of the military he enlisted to help.
