Before, my notions about gays were uninformed. Confronted with an actual gay person whom I liked, respected and trusted, I was forced to reexamine my prejudices, and they began to crumble.
What happened to me, of course, has happened to millions of other Americans. It's easy to be homophobic if you don't know anyone who is openly gay. But that's true of fewer and fewer people. As gays have become forthright about their sexual orientation, the rest of us have had to assess them not as gays, but as whole human beings.
So I've had gay friends and gay co-workers. I've had lesbian neighbors. I've had gay and lesbian relatives. When one gay relative back in Texas had a wedding—in all but the legal sense—my wife and I attended and found it eerily similar to the straight version. All these experiences have impressed on me the obvious fact that homosexuals are not an alien species.
He points out that the vast, vast majority of respondents to the poll on repealing DADT who believed that they had served with homosexuals overwhelmingly stated that serving with gays had had no effect whatsoever on their units performance: 90% of Army combat units and 84% of Marines felt that it simply didn't matter.
Takeaway:
As one "special operations warfighter" quoted in the report said, "We have a gay guy. He's big, he's mean, and he kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay." I know the feeling.
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