Come here. Sit down, @thegreenbisamurai, and shut the fuck up for 5 fucking minutes so maybe you can pull your head out of your ass.
It's not about wanting to join the military, it's about having the right to join the military without having to hide who we are.
It's about having the right to participate in every part of public life, even the ones that suck.
Got it?
Sometimes, I forget that some of you are young enough to not understand what it was like 25+ years ago, and that you really can't fucking comprehend what it was like to live in even the greatest bastions of liberalism back then, but you really fucking can't, can you?
And some of you are just so fucking happy to throw poor and red-area queers under the bus because our lived reality is just not radical enough for you, and that's so fucking obvious.
The only way for my grandfather to not go back into the coal mines as a young man was to join the Navy. There was functionally zero other economic opportunity for him. This is still the reality for a lot of people, including a lot of queer people, because, wait for it:
The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the United States. In many places, it is functionally the only major employer.
There are approximately 2.1 million active servicemembers. Counting civilian employees, the DoD employs approximately 3.2 million people. For comparison, the largest private employer in the US is Wal-Mart, which employs ~2.3 million people.
Do you think that it might matter to our overall civil rights to have the largest employer in the country (and one of the largest employers in the world) change its position on whether us dirty fags can have jobs there? Do you think that it might make a difference in whether we can work in other, better jobs to have an employer have to make a decision on whether they're going to fire ✨️a veteran✨️ for being queer?
I do not actually think it's fucking great to join the armed forces. I am not fooled by the flag-waving bullshit that I was raised with, and in fucking fact, I have an extremely low amount of tolerance for worshiping the military and the country and all the OORAH fuckshit precisely because I was raised by a father who worshipped his Greatest Generation father. Okay? Mistake this for some idolization of the military or some wilful ignorance of how shitty it is you should not.
What you should do is understand that for a lot of people, joining the military is a ticket to eating. Joining the military means being able to get health care and a roof over your head. That is done on purpose because the military fucking preys on poor kids, and that fucking sucks, but it's still reality right now. Shutting queer kids out of that means shutting them out of the ability to get out of where they are economically. And, again, more than that, it means shutting them out of the public commons. It means that when gays gained the right to serve openly, the biggest employer in the US said "FAGS CAN WORK HERE AND YOU CAN'T FIRE THEM FOR FAGGOTRY, ACTUALLY."
And that changes things in other places much the same way that Medicaid changing a policy almost invariably causes insurance companies to follow suit.
This is why you will often see, when you look at timetables for employment rights, that people gain the right to be out at work and have employment protections first in state & local employment and then those protections are extended to private employers. This is because - as I've said before - it is easier to accomplish getting state employers not to discriminate first. It's easier to make the argument that the state shouldn't discriminate rather than that the state should enforce non-discrimination on private employers, so you make that argument first, and then you continue on to the private employers. It isn't an end point. It isn't the final answer to the problem. It's a strategic step along the way that immediately improves life for queer people and creates precedent for further improvement.
This is also why when people try to take rights away from queer people - like with bathroom bills - they often start by trying to remove those rights in state-owned locations. This creates precedent.
So, like, unless you're going to show up with jobs falling out of your pockets and a strategic way to accomplish the same fucking thing while still leaving in place the precedent of the largest employer in the US thinking it's A-OK to fire fags, dykes and trannies, kindly shut the fuck up, because your words are more than pointless.
I know that's not as like, cool, hip, and groovy to think "hey, this is a load-bearing pillar of society, maybe we shouldn't be shut out of it," and it doesn't make you feel like you've got the Purest Of Leftist Ideology as saying ASSIMILATIONIST seems to for you, but it does have the upside of actually doing something that measurably improves the lives of queer people and sets a precedent for future improvement rather than being pointless [wanking gesture] posturing for leftist clout.