Honor Every Veteran
Just about everyone fantasizes about being a hero at some point in their life. Whether it’s a sports hero, or a character from a movie, or one of countless other varieties, we all want to feel the adulation that comes from adventure, achievement or just simply being the center of attention.
Being a hero also implies that you may just be slightly better than everyone else - that you’re special. Heroes, you see, test themselves to the limit, and pass! Being a hero implies purity and redemption born of self-immolation for a cause. Heroes are true to a higher calling and therefore seem to have greater integrity, at least that’s what we hope and would like to believe.
When you are declared a hero you are more than accepted - you are imitated. You become the ideal that others strive to be.
If you are a hero in America, that’s the kind of treatment you get. Except of course, if you are one of the sixty-five thousand or so current lesbian, gay, or bisexual members of our Armed Forces who serve in silence.
If America decided to honor gay and lesbian service members as heroes, which they undoubtedly are, then they would become the stuff of dreams and inspiration. Kids everywhere might, god forbid, actually look up to them and want to be like them.
As a society, we might just begin to focus on who we are as individuals and not rely on worn-out stereotypes to choose our relationships.
Lamentably, America instead chooses to lie to itself, offering all sorts of reasons why gays and lesbians can’t be hero’s in the service of their country, most of which make no sense or are thinly veiled bigotry. Vast swaths of Mr. and Mrs. Straight continue to quiver, behind their little white picket fences and in the sweat-stained pews of their churches, at the thought of anyone not like them being honored or emulated. They would rather engage in a grand lie about what the gay community is, so that their limited world does not implode under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
Honoring every man and woman, who serves our country, means telling the truth. They exist. They do their jobs well. They are brave beyond belief. They are every shape, color, size and ethnicity possible.
They are heroes and I love them.
-Jeff McGowan, prior US Army Major
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-----11-06-07
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