Thanks mar! 

I would also like to add a plug for the Courage Campaign.  They are doing great work here in California.

While other organizations fund-raise and do nothing, Courage Campaign is actually training people across California in how to have conversations with friends, family and strangers about marriage equality, and sending them out as speakers.  Real on-the-ground, face-to-face community organizing.

After you sign their petition, see if you can throw them a little love.  Make it in honor of Kevin’s birthday if you like…

Proudly signed.

Allan, that’s great info on the Courage Campaign. I had not heard about them before. But their tactics sound like exactly what is needed. I’ve seen within my own family (gay sister with long-term partner) that bigotry is hard to maintain when its victims have human faces—even deranged, redneck fundies can turn away from the Dark Side, at least a little!

I felt so disheartened about the prospects for marriage equality after Prop H8 and similar measures in AZ and FL. But now I feel more certain than ever that it’ll happen before I start collecting Social Security.

Signed, but don’t expect Obama to do the right thing. He’s shown that he’s determined to be on the wrong side of the 21st Century’s most critical civil rights battle. History will judge him harshly, and rightfully so.

I have lots of friends who are stupid enough to be in the military and I tell them right to their faces that their service is a waste of time, they do not represent me nor anyone that I know, (most of them agree) I’d feel safer if they got a real job, and the chances of being gunned down by some next door nut job US Marine beating the shit out of his wife is far more likely than losing my life or yours to global terrorism.

Fuck Choi, he works against the interests of me and the civilian population of the US, He upholds the Constitution in a pig’s eye, and is a cop for the cocksuckers who who sent the economic productivity of our homeland overseas, there is nothing positive nor progressive to blabber on about this little prima donna Gi Joe Army Boy.

Fuck him, and all his hetero closet Khaki Queens.

A standing army is the most volatile threat to a stable democracy according to George Washington.

Get a real job, Choi, I need your protection like I need police harassing my children in public schools, you are unnecessary and a parasite.

Jeebus, Scooter, while I agree 100% that the Iraq War is a fucking crime and that the military industrial complex has its fat feedstraw in our wallets to the detriment of all that is good and holy, I do think it’s possible for individual soldiers to be non-parasites who are earnestly trying to do the right thing.

I know a few, even. My former Navy doc sister-in-law, for example, who was engaged in the non-parasitic task of patching up the maimed without regard to nationality or creed. Like Choi, she served from the closet, so yeah, I think there’s something positive and progressive to be blabbered on about with regard to breaking down bigotry barriers in the service.

An argument about doing away with a standing army can certainly be made, but from my perspective at least, it’s probably best done by placing the villainy where it belongs—the money men and their political enablers—and not on the rank and file grunts. And if we are going to have a standing army, I’d prefer that it not enshrine homophobia in its policies. I hope we can agree on that, at least.

Scooter regardless of your issues with having a military at all in this country, the issue being addressed here is whether constitutional equal protections apply to everyone regardless of sexual orientation.  If Lt. Choi had been fired for being Jewish or African American rather than for being gay would your rant have been the same?

I just got an email from Knights Out with some updates, including that Dan was mentioned by name in Tuesday’s White House press briefing.

And this just in:

Save the Date:  1LT Dan Choi will be honored as a Grand Marshal for this year’s San Francisco Gay Pride Parade on June 28th. 

Oh, and scooter:  I’m from the Groucho Marx school of not wanting to belong to any club that would have me as a member, and if LGBT could openly serve, that wouldn’t have persuaded me to join. 

I just want those who wish to participate to have the same right as everyone else…

Dan, I wish you the best with your plight and hope you can serve.  I am sure you are a proud Officer.

If you are allowed to continue serve, can you please have someone with some fashion sense design those uniforms like the one in the pixxx?  Tom Ford maybe?