If gays can openly serve, will straights still want to?

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If gays can openly serve, will straights still want to?
By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, November 18, 2009

WASHINGTON — Stephen Vossler was an 18-year-old from a conservative Nebraska family when he joined the Army. So when he found out his first roommate was being kicked out of the service under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law — and soon afterward that his new best friend was secretly gay — he was stunned.

Today, nine years later, Vossler is an outspoken advocate for allowing homosexuals to serve openly, saying his experience is the perfect example of the transition from awkwardness to acceptance that most troops will work through if the ban is overturned.

“Are straight guys going to feel uncomfortable? Yeah, they definitely will,” the former Army intelligence officer said. “But you feel uncomfortable digging a foxhole. You feel uncomfortable riding in a Humvee for 10 hours.

“You’re gonna have to get over it,” Vossler continued. “I think there’s going to be a lot of people who are going to logic their way through this and end up saying it just doesn’t matter.”

Sometime in the next few months, lawmakers on Capitol Hill say they will begin work toward repealing the controversial law and testing those theories. At the heart of the matter: whether the U.S. military should be allowed to maintain a different set of employment rules regarding homosexuals than nearly every other U.S. public and private workplace, firing employees based solely on their sexual orientation.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=66171