msharmony, the arrangements are not forced they are a condition of the job. The conditions exist before the applicants sign up and they really don't shoot you for deciding you want to leave if you do not like the accommodations. You keep referring to comfort as if comfort was a right troops are entitled to. That too is given up when they sign up and they certainly discover that in basic training. These men and women are being trained for war, they are being trained to experience and adapt to the most uncomfortable of situations.

If men and women being trained to go to war are not capable of handling a sexual advance from a unit member how will they react in a country where they are chided relentlessly, where even little children are taught to disrespect American soldiers.

You and the American people EXPECT that our soldiers are more than instruments of death, we EXPECT them to carry some semblance of American values and ethics and NOT to demonstrate the grade school mentality that cannot stand up to name-calling or a homophobic fear of bigoted adults who are incapable of deterring how to cope with a non-violent sexual advance without using violence in return.

America has created this environment of false fear by allowing discrimination of homosexuals to continue for too long. We have hid in closets, we have denied who we are, we have lied and those actions allow you (the fearful heterosexuals) to have just as false a conception of safety based on some erroneous perception of segregation. We are not now nor have we ever been a segregated part of the population, except as existed through lies and denial.

To change that, we must end all the laws that allow people to believe they are protected by some invisible barrier that serves to segregate us from you mainstream lives. We, as homosexuals, must come out of hiding and be conspicuous, even though we only want to be part of the whole. We are not separate we are your neighbors, we are you class mates and in schools, and gyms we shower with you and have the locker next to yours. We are your bosses, your hired help; we are your teachers, your council members, you caregivers. We are not your molesters nor are we a third sex and if the off chance occurs that one of us finds you so delightful a woman and, through misunderstanding, makes a non-violent sexual advance - then by god, have the humble nature to accept the flattery and decency to turn down the offer.

The only reason you and others do not consider that easy route is most likely because- as a society, we have agreed to allow men to be so aggressive as to fear their advances. Even other men FEAR the advances of other men because they live the mentality we have accepted in our society, that masculinity requires aggression.

In my opinions, homosexual males are less likely to be aggressive, logically so - consider that they live in country where they have to hide, where they often fear being found out, where the wrong move can lead to violence and the mover is highly outnumbered. LOGIC!

And so the solution = end the discriminatory laws so that the fear can be faced and dispelled.