Reward for proficient and well-decorated fighter pilot: Kick him out because he’s gay

Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach is a fighter pilot and weapons systems for the Air Force. Aubrey Sarvis writes that Fehrenbach has excelled at everything he has done for the Air Force. His reward? They are kicking him out of the Air Force because he is gay.

The Air Force is about to discharge this guy, a virtual poster boy for Air Force recruiting, because he is gay? Someone has to be kidding. This is sheer madness.

Let me check my calendar . . . yep, it's 2009. Obama is in office. This is insane. And it's been done many times before, for instance, when the military kicked out dozens of gay Arabic language specialists during the Iraq invasion because they were also gay. Sarvis advises that we need far more than an executive order to stop this madness to protect the remaining 65,000 gays and lesbians in the military. We need to change DADT immediately. We must rip it apart and choose our military personnel on one criterion: whether they can do the job.

A law is a law, even a bad law. Our country and service members are suffering the consequences as we watch this theater of the absurd play out. We need this new 111th Congress and this new President to engage each other immediately and with a sense of urgency to stop this obvious madness.

To compound this tragedy, Fehrenbach was two years shy of retiring with a full pension. See Fehrenbach's interview by Rachel Maddow at the top link.

Continue ReadingReward for proficient and well-decorated fighter pilot: Kick him out because he’s gay

Amazon.com Now Censors As Policy

Amazon.com has just initiated a new marketing policy. They are stripping away the sales ranking of any book with so-called Adult Content. Here's their little explanation: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us. Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage What this mean in effect, however, is that books primarily with gay and lesbian content are being singled out for exclusion from database searches. It is being applied in a bigoted and surprisingly hamfisted manner to conform to someone's standard of what constitutes Offensive Material. Adult Content generally means anything with more than coyly suggested sex in it. However, as a sample of the books not having their sales ranking stripped away, consider these: --Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women) --Rosemary Rogers' Sweet Savage Love" (explicit heterosexual romance); --Kathleen Woodiwiss' The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance); --Bertrice Smal's Skye o'Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances --and Alan Moore's Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel) These book sell very well, generally, so it's obvious that there's a dollar connection to this new policy. Midlist---the vast majority of books---will be targeted.

Continue ReadingAmazon.com Now Censors As Policy