For centuries, homosexuals have been harassed into separate closets and are now being told that a military demand for confidentiality is about returning to that situation. Crusaders instilling such shame and defenders from them imagine that this policy is about their own holy war. It is not, but rather it asks whether homosexuals will be allowed to move onto this or any non-disclosure without being stigmatized as acting in shame. Nor is it about imposed dishonesty; after all how can one lie if one doesn't tell? How can one's silence infer homosexuality if none who are asked answer? The problem is not with Don’t Ask Don't Tell; it is with those heterosexuals who presume that they are only on the don't-ask portion of the protocol. Why are setting-the-record-straight soldiers being allowed to place the onus of the policy's practicality on the homosexual community? (May 27, 2010)

We live in a society that often takes non-disclosure as an affirmation of shame. Raising its issue may be support or the cast of the curious who would reel in relief from an otherwise dull afternoon on the line “Don’t be ashamed.”

The policy, Don’t Ask Don't Tell, offers an opportunity to break the misconnection between casting out and recasting others. Those whose lives are riddled with shame (either as recipients, inflictors or both) see their own experience as now being imposed upon military Gays & Lesbians. Looking back upon the centuries, this is an easy mistake and ought to be an easy sell, yet I am telling those same endurers not to even think of it.

Instead support an awareness that, beyond inflicted or legitimate shame, a vast portion of our inner selves is simply private. It may be something magnificent that would shrivel before the thousand-eyed monster of Greek mythology; something just too easily misunderstood even by those convinced that they are helping us through it; or something that may mess up other lives, even the life whose curiosity now probes. This last case has the military experience written all over it.

The current policy will never be ridiculous. Voting it out would merely legislate the misunderstanding. Even if one day men and women on joint patrols, were sleeping side by side, and being posted together as lookouts; the policy would not have been absurd. It would merely have become dated, while generally being considered to have been absurd.