> This just in from my friend Ken Sherrill, chair of the Hunter College
> poli sci department... Interesting pattern in "Don't Ask Don't Tell"
> discharges of same-sexers from the military: up during the Clinton
> years, down during Bush's. Guess they need the queers as cannon
> fodder.
You think? Or could it be that Bush is scaring soldiers back into the closet? (Doesn't seem that they'd be needed as cannon fodder but not linguists.) Or possibly that, under the Clinton adminstration, the Pentagon already got all the low-hanging...um, let me rephrase that...the Pentagon had a chance to cherry-pick (okay, +you+ choose the damn metaphor) the gays who'd been more out than others. It'd surely be interesting to see how length of service varied during those years, wouldn't it? If the average length of service for discharged soldiers got shorter as the years went on, that'd say one thing--if not, that'd say another.
All the best,
John A