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Thursday, February 18, 2010

This Hippy Faggot Joins With Mainstream America In Demanding Repeal of DADT

Political Wire:
A new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll finds that by a 54% to 35% margin voters overwhelmingly support repealing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

"Unlike so many other issues in the country right now, this issue simply does not polarize voters. Even among Republicans, repeal finds support with four in ten voters."

I am a person who disapproves of marriage as a reduction of the beauty of manifold human affiliations to a policed property relation, a curious enterprise fueled by infantile fantasies of arriving at personal "completion" through an unholy (also, unspecified) "melding" with a "soul mate." And I am also a person who disapproves ferociously of the manifold murders undertaken in our names by military forces, a curious enterprise fueled by infantile fantasies that killing people's friends and family members in an indiscriminate manner makes them friendlier and less belligerent on the whole to our pesky Republic than encouraging ties of diplomacy and cultural exchange and commerce would do.

As such a person it is not without regret that I find the primary avenues through which so many lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transfolks, intersex people, sissies, tomboys, geeks, bohemians, punks, freethinkers, queer and otherwise questioning folks (among whom I am one, as is my loving partner and best friend of more than eight years, who also happens to disapprove of both marriage and militarism) are finding our ways to the kind of mainstream acceptance and institutional recognition that is finally ameliorating generations of relentless brutalizing abjecting violence, harassment, bullying, and exploitation seem more often than not to involve an opening up to queers of participation in the very marriages and militarisms I otherwise forcefully disdain.

I will say, however, that I find it far more edifying and provocative to be a queer who repudiates marriage and the military as part of what being queer means to me in the world, than I have found living in a world in which my exclusion from marriage and the military declares me a second class citizen who can expect to be treated as such.

Principled rejections of war-mongering and enforced conformity to possessive familial arrangements are incomparably more powerful positions for those who advocate more capacious views of the peaceful and loving possibilities available to human beings than are the present unprincipled blanket exclusions of so many of us from these deadly attitudes and institutions, exclusions that make us too indifferent and enable too many to evade the necessity of taking public stands on aggressive militarism and possessive affiliation by relieving us from personal responsibility for their perpetuation.

By fighting for the right to inclusion to these institutions we better champion our equity, and then by repudiating these institutions once they do include us us we better champion our diversity. The apparently paradoxical stance this implies toward these institutions is simply a variation on the ongoing and interminable paradoxical implementation of the democratic/consensualist ethos as such, which demands equity in diversity and hence can never finally settle.

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