Senator Webb:
I find your reasoning for voting against the DADT Repeal to be disingenuous at best and cowardly at worst.
You believe it’s appropriate to leave it up to current active heterosexual military personnel and their families to impress their own prejudices upon the decision-making process of the United States Military? That the bigotry of one group of people should in any way hold sway over the future careers, well-being and very lives of other human beings?
You’re making the same arguments that Rand Paul has been making these last couple of weeks.
Why is it that that occasionally we are treated to you standing tall on television and talking up the value of honor, duty and respecting the chain of command and now, frankly, you completely reverse yourself and turn into the Today’s Biggest Hypocrite and hand off the Big Decision to the foot soldiers—LITERALLY!—when it comes to whether bigotry should be allowed to persist in the US Military?
Are our soldiers so fragile, Sir?
Did not President Harry Truman go through these same trials, overcome these same obstacles, same arguments with respect to desegregation?
And why did he do it?
In the face of being accused of performing social experiments with the US Military, of playing games with unit cohesion and weakening troop strength, he did it because this country must remain something worth defending.
Are we a country of freedom and fairness, Sir? Or are our troops out there continuing to defend a country that’s perfectly content to punish those of its own defenders because of nothing but indefensible bigotry?
How much better would the never-declared war in Iraq have gone had we not short-sightedly, STUPIDLY, dishonorably discharged language translators because they were gay?
I used to respect you.
You’ve lost my respect.
Were I a Virginian, you’d have lost far more, Sir: you’d have lost my vote.
Regards,
Jeffrey Barbose
I was always proud of you but even more so with this wonderful letter you’ve written. Don’t ever stop fighting for what you believe in,even if it’s not the popular thing to do. I hope we had at least a small part in who you are. We love you.
Could Webb’s position simply be a political stance? That would be damning also, but about what you’d expect from a politician, no?
Joely,
Pure political stance makes it worse, because that makes the man a hypocrite as well.
And I’m pretty sure I despise hypocrisy more that just about anything else.
He paints himself as some great stand-up kinda guy with the manner and bearing of a military martinet and all that stuff that the rest of us are just supposed to honor and respect from a proper civilian distance.
It’s funny how military people seem to both elevate themselves above the rest of us and play the humble servants who serve there country, putting all else above their own lives, isn’t it?
Anyway, if the man hadn’t been parading himself as one of these types, then Webb-as-politician is a no-brainer and I’d shrug it off.
But he doesn’t get to be some big hero and then pull shit like this. Not with me.
He served his country with honor? Fine. Now he’s serving it with dishonor. It’s a wash.