Soldier of Change by Stephen Snyder-Hill

Author:Stephen Snyder-Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2014-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

11 The Debate

Since you’ve read the first chapter in this book, you know that my resolution to stay closeted to the military came crumbling down the minute I uploaded my video to Google. But for about an hour before that fateful click I just stared at my laptop, watching my life flash before my eyes. I went through every moment of being pissed off by the things people had said over the years. I started remembering all the times I’d had to alter my life to make everyone else feel comfortable, all the freedoms I’d had to give up over and above what straight soldiers sacrifice to serve their country.

With each memory my blood pressure rose, and my fists clenched harder and harder. The final straw was hearing a group of candidates, most of whom had never served a day of their life in the military, threaten to take everything away and force me to go through it all again. So I hit send. Fuck them, I hit send. That simple click of the mouse set off a shockwave that “outed” me to the world and placed me in the unusual predicament of being booed on national television. Then adding insult to injury was Rick Santorum’s horrible answer to my question. Here is the transcript:

RICK SANTORUM: I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege too, and removing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military’s job is to do one thing, and that is to defend our country.

MEGYN KELLY: What would you do with soldiers like Stephen Hill?

SANTORUM: What we are doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. And that’s tragic. I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if Rick Santorum was president. That policy would be rein-stituted, and as far as people who are in, I would not throw them out because that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration. But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past, which was, sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself, whether you are heterosexual or homosexual.

I don’t know where to begin. I know this has been analyzed to death, so I will just give my perspective. Right now rape of female soldiers is a huge problem in military deployments. So if you want to take the ignorant stance that sex has no presence in the military, then females will continue to be raped. I never asked Mr. Santorum (or anyone else) if I could have sex while I was doing my military job, but I think he knew that. He was trying to manipulate

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