10/19/08 #5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njmjOg1GUDY#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCfwDmLk_iQ&feature=related


“Well, if you are gay we don’t take you. YOU ARE CONSIDERED UNQUALIFIED…”

This statement is from an interview that was held in 2007 and was the reaction of a military recruitment officer, via an email conversation, after being notified of Corey Andrew’s sexual orientation. According to this interview the military works on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” system and is more than willing to sign new soldiers to fill the spaces left by the bodies of dead soldiers that are being shipped back to the U.S. awaiting burial. It sounds like it is ok if you are gay or lesbian, just so long as you keep that to yourself and tell nobody about it, but if you were to “come out of the closest,” so to speak, then you are automatically unqualified to serve your country.

The email transcripts that are being used as the vocal point of this interview venture off into another form of inequality that plagues this country from the inside and out. Not only is Andrew’s sexual orientation in question but the fact that he is African-American became an issue for the military recruitment officer as well calling him something along the lines of un-american.

“…You go back to Africa and do your gay voodoo, limbo, wango, tango and…prance and run all over the place half naked there and practice your gay morals over there, that’s where you belong…

I’m reminded of a Malcolm X speech where he talks about how black people were essentially stolen from their homes and how, “…we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.” I find it ironic how centuries ago, Americans took part in the slave trade, they captured Africans and locked them in chains against their will in order to put them to work on the fields or in the homes. And in the days since slavery was abolished, those same Americans who worked so hard in bringing African people here would love to see those ex-slaves return to their original continent.