The Senate voted Saturday afternoon to repeal the ban on gays in the military, marking a major victory for gay rights and an end to the 17-year old "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

The bill now heads to President Barack Obama, who plans to sign it into law, overturning what advocates believed was a discriminatory policy that unfairly ended the careers thousands of gay members of the military over the years.

I would hope that those military personnel who oppose this change would be given the opportunity to be honorably discharged, if they desired it.

The Spartans had mandatory gayness, and they were pretty bad-ass for a while. (Ignoring the 300 fantasy)

That's not really what I meant. There's a lot of fantasy in that movie. I'm pretty sure the Persians weren't horrible monsters. And all that talk about freedom... The Spartans made slaves out of one group of Greeks. It wasn't all that historically accurate in many areas, but it was good fun.

Either way, they loved the cock. Historians make the Spartan women sound pretty hot though. They didn't play with dolls, but played more physical games. I like em feisty and tough.

I doubt it. Although, if you went to Berkly or Yale, I don't know why you'd go join the military... We send our poor to war, not people that can afford to go to Yale.

ROTC is not quite the same as joining the military. Remember, throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, officer positions were given out to members of rich families. We send our poor to war under the command of people that can afford to go to Yale. That way the people who go to Yale can claim to have served their country. For all we like to rag on George W. Bush for his national guard service record, that's really nothing new. Dozens of beloved political figures before him, both liberal and conservatives, have touted military service that never would have placed them on the front lines. If you can say you were in the military, it lets you pretend that you're a paragon of patriotism and machismo like George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt. For every rich kid who has his family pull strings to get him into the military and then ends up dragging his wounded comrades to shore with his teeth, there's a hundred more who sign up for fast tracks to officer positions because it looks good on a resume and have their families ensure they end up stationed in the middle of Kansas where enemy fire can't reach them.

As for the middle of Kansas, Coro, you're presumeably referring to Fort Riley.

No, I'm referring to a general distance from combat. Kansas is roughly the geographic center of the country, and not being invaded by Communist forces.

Families pulling strings to get anyone much of anything is a pre-Viet Nam era phenomenon at most. There are fast-track officer positions, sure: it's called Direct Comission and its used to fill shortages in certain officer branches due to needs with current deployments. Direct comission was exceedingly rare before the current wars started and generally went to people who were already enlisted anyhow.

As for ROTC, the Service Academies, they all have plenty of prior enlisted in them, and OCS is entirely prior enlisted. In any of those cases you still have to actually complete a college degree and pass quite a bit of other evaluations before you get comissioned - and no, the need for a degree is not a barrier to the poor with the availability of scholarships, loans, and the various ways you can get assistance in paying back what loans you might incur.

The service academies still generally require the nomination of a congressman to get in. That doesn't rule out the poor, but it makes it exceedingly easy for the wealthy. There's still an old boy's club at work.

Not really. The tests you have to pass in order to qualify for the Academy to even compete for the nomination are exceedingly difficult and competitive, to say nothing of the standards of academics and extracirricular activity participation. More to the point, the academies themselves are pretty **** tough your first year; you don't just coast through by any means.

I tried to get into the Naval Academy and went through the entire process.

That doesn't really have any bearing on what I said.

Now, as to the comment from Farther that people out to be allowed to leave the military if the disagree with DADT, I see no good reason for that.