About Don't Ask...Don't Tell

I was going to write something about the latest move to eradicate Don't Ask...Don't Tell.  I remember reading when Harry Truman desegrated the armed forces the same arguments that are used against gays were used against blacks. It is time to stop this double-standard. We need to remember that the Constitution says: "Liberty and justice for all..."

Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in Team of Rivals that when the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott Case in 1856 it ruled against Dred Scott a slave. "Two days later, on March 6, the historic decision was read by the seventy-nine-year-old Taney in the old Supreme Court chamber...The 7-2 decision was beathtaking in its scope and consequences. The Court ruled that blacks 'are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in  the Constitution.' Therefore Scott had no standing in federal court.' This should have decided the case, but Taney went further. 'Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution had been intended to apply to blacks,' he said. 'Blacks were 'so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'" Goodwin writes that later reviewing the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later said, was "one of the Court's greatest self-inflicted wounds.."

What does this have to do with gay rights? Everything in my book. Joey Kennedy of The Birmingham News has written a great column about this--read it for yourself. Halford Luccock, a great preacher of another era said the hardest words to pronounce in any language are the little words not the big words. All is a word we are still having trouble pronouncing.