(re-posted with permission, http://adamflux.livejournal.com/8895.html)
Senator,
Surely you have recently heard of the proposed legislation in Uganda which will lead to execution of HIV positive homosexuals. This concept brings me the most chilling frost of hate that has ever fallen upon my heart, and you have no doubt seen the winter that is spreading through many in the LGBT community.
I am a gay man, and further I am a combat veteran and have served for five years to include my fifteen months in Iraq. For five years I complied with regulation and took the steps to ensure that my command was in the dark, or at least left without solid evidence, and I felt horrible about it the whole time. Yes, I was an intelligence soldier and I understand the keeping of secrets is an important component of our national defense, but it’s not a pleasant thing as you no doubt know. Many people do not appreciate the exhilaration of raw honesty because they have never been required to keep a secret they would rather not keep.
But whatever injustices and personal inconveniences our own laws placed on me and my kind, you never sought to execute us. Second class citizens some may argue, but no one so far has called us here an Enemy of the State.
When I got out of active service I took a roadtrip back to Ohio, and while I traveled I decided to take a stop in DC as it was the 4th of July and I thought it would be fitting to spend the day contemplating monuments of those who had served before me. While I was visiting the Mall, there was one inscription that stuck in my mind at the WW2 memorial, “Americans came to liberate, not to conquer; to restore freedom and end tyranny.”
In the past ten years, we have invaded two countries and considered several others, and whatever the dressings on these campaigns the simple reality is that we invaded Afghanistan for revenge. David Letterman commented that “We wanted to do something because something terrible had been done to us.”
As justified as that sentiment was, it does not live up to the noble ideals that were set in stone at that monument. Of course there was a Taliban and then there was Saddam, but the fact of the matter was that we were an angry superpower taking to task any country that we could either find our enemies in or pretend had WMDs.
In 1994, we were a complacent superpower that let 800,000 people be sent to brutal, horrific deaths in Rwanda, and pardon my terms, but those savages are at it again. It’s not enough that there be pirates in those waters or warlords putting rifles in the hands of ten year olds, now there’s a final solution for the gays.
I know perfectly well that chances that we will be able or willing to intervene in the killing of a sexual minority in a country free of oil, WMDs, or alleged Al-Qaida operatives is so close to nothing as makes no odds, but I appeal to you and your colleagues in the name of all of us who have served silently in the ranks and in the spirit of those ideals cut into the monuments that gleam in the summer sun that our nation not stand for another African genocide, that we intervene, if not by force of arms then by way of economic and political sanctions, that we forbid American agencies giving humanitarian aid to a land where humanitarianism is soon to be a crime, and that we speak out so that the state of Uganda and the names of the people who have engineered this might be remembered alongside Heinrich Himmler and Josef Megele.
Thank you for your time,
Adam Locke
(re-posted with permission, http://adamflux.livejournal.com/8895.html)
