Thanks for the thread Mare,
As for homosexuals being in the military, I have no issue with that anymore than I would with women in the military or minorities in the military, they are all welcome. The one thing that does bother me is this....
Right now men dress, shower and sleep separate from women right? But why is that? They are not discriminating against women by giving them their own private place to shower, dress and sleep; they are giving them a place for privacy.
If someone who is homosexual…. let’s say a homosexual woman.
Does she not see other women the same as a man would, so if you are showering, dressing exc. with her then it’s not much different than doing those things with a man in the room.....at least according to the reasons we separate men from women during those events. Of course they all work side by side and eat side by side and goof off after ours side by side, but we do separate them during the more private things like showering and dressing and sleeping.
So how would that be dealt with is my only question. I think the current system is not working except for during the shower/dressing department. Dressing in front of a woman who you assume thinks about a woman’s body the same way you do is harmless, but if you know they think about it differently then you could be more likely to feel uncomfortable. I would, just as I would if a man were in the room.
I ask this because when I was in Middle school we had a gym teacher who was openly homosexual and it was very uncomfortable when she would hang out in the locker room and watch the girls dressing and showering. I ended up with an F in PE because I just was not going to dress down and shower after PE. I did not care that she was homosexual but dressing and showering in front of her seemed no different than if I were dressing and showering in front of a male PE teacher. The rest of PE was fine, I never had issue with her directing us in class or in any thing else just like I would have had no problem with my male PE teachers but I would have not dressed or showered in front of any of our male PE teachers either. I asked other girls if they felt weird and many said yes but they were not willing to take the F like I did.
Now this PE teacher was extra strange because it was obvious she really liked the dress down/shower part of the day better than the rest of it. Normally you would not have that issue because being homosexual does not make you a perv as she apparently was.
As a teen us girls would sleep in the same bed when we had sleep overs and never thought anything of it but we would not have done that with our male friends even if it was as innocent as it was with our female friends, getting dressed in front of our female friends was as natural as doing it alone but not something we would have done in front of our male friends and all for one reason, we knew the males even though we were just friends looked at our body differently than our female friends did. It was not about discriminating against our male friends; it was about not feeling comfortable.
So what do we do with the people male and female in the service who would feel strange doing private things like showering exc. with someone they know looks at their body differently than all the others in the room?
I can not figure out how to solve that and its something I have been wondering about since Clinton first started the “don’t ask don’t tell.”
I am not even sure that I think the sleeping part would be an issue, its not as though they share beds or anything. but the dressing and showering part..... is where I would have a really hard time if I were in the military
