The other day I was playing World of Warcraft (WoW) and an interesting discussion started in guild chat. It seems many members of the US military play WoW, this one guy Uranus (a homophobe named Uranus…that’s something) was saying how gays are still not allowed to sign up. The US military’s policy is still “don’t ask don’t tell”, but according to Uranus a homophobic attitude is almost compulsory. “We are required to be homophobic.”

I told him it was really quite silly that gays are not allowed in the military as some of the best warriors in history were gay, such as Alexander the Great. He told me I was wrong. Alex was not gay! Bullshit.

My guild is mainly Aussie so we told him that the Australian military allows gays, he answered, “that’s why Australia has second rate military.” After this the augment turned personal, and really quite funny.

But this raises a question, can gays fight? Can gays be an asset to the military? If you are in a foxhole with a gay solder will this have unfortunate consequences?

The whole argument boils down to gays not being “real” men apparently. Gays are meant to be sissy – like woman in other words. All the arguments used against woman get directed at gays. Frankly this line of argument is stupid. Woman are physically weaker but gay men are still men. So it comes down to mental toughness, leadership ability and courage.

Women have babies – that’s courage. In my opinion women also have fine leadership under pressure. My guild master and raid leader in WoW is a woman. She has to be in command of 25 people leading them through a dungeon with many hideous monsters. It can be quite stressful and has lead other weaker leaders to crack, to start swearing on vent (Ventrillo is a program used by WoW addicts to talk to each other – it’s like a conference call) and saying things like, “THAT’S A 50DKP MINUS.” She is the best raid leader I’ve had, and has lead our guild to some great achievements. If she was the inferior, weak willed and emotion ruled person that some bigots believe all women to be then this would not be possible.

If sissy women are able to achieve great things why can’t sissy men?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Computer Games, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.