Why It Isn't Okay To Kick The "T" Out Of LGBT
Unfortunately, Barney Frank spoke for a lot of people when he made this statement after the ENDA debacle of 2007:
Being in the legislative minority is easy - pulling together to block bad things does not require a lot of agonizing over tough decisions. Being in the majority is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have the ability to move forward in a positive way on important public policy goals. Detracting from that is the fact that it is never possible for us at any given time to get everything that we would like, and so we have to make difficult choices.
It's an incredibly seductive argument because it sounds so reasonable. Now that the good guys are in charge, we have to keep our priorities straight. We have to step back from our principles and be ruthlessly practical about making sure we achieve the most good for the most people. It's for the Greater Good, you see -- nothing personal! And we solemnly promise that we'll come back and scrape what's left of everyone else off the sidewalk once we get to the Promised Land. Really, we will.
The thing is, no matter how much people "really mean it" when they promise to come back, things change when you no longer have skin in the game. Suddenly, you have other important things to worry about too. Surely it's not too much to ask that they wait a little longer while we take care of this, that, and the other? It's not as if we're really abandoning them -- we're just asking them to hold out a little longer so that we can do it properly. We're coming. Really, we are.
But perhaps it's better to talk about this a bit less directly.
Throughout history, most of the really good militaries have either formally or informally adopted a simple rule: no one gets left behind. Armchair generals have often derided this as a rather silly piece of romanticism, especially when it's applied to soldiers who are already severely wounded. Surely it must be better to cut your losses by abandoning those who are no longer combat effective, at least in a desperate situation?
Tactically speaking, yes. Sometimes men who could have lived to fight another day will die because they refused to abandon their buddies. And sometimes those deaths will accomplish nothing in the military sense. You know what? They know that, and they do it anyway. Because for thousands of years, military honour has said that you don't abandon your buddies when they need you. It doesn't matter how hopeless the situation is. It doesn't even matter if you die in the doing. No one gets left behind.
The thing is, that crazy little bit of doctrine has changed the course of empires. Because every soldier in your army is going to have the confidence to fight just a little bit harder, knowing that his buddies are going to look out for him no matter what. Because sometimes it's that last unit making that hopeless stand that turns the tide. The Germans call it schwerpunkt, the focal point -- the principle that an otherwise inconsequential impact at exactly the right time, at exactly the right place, can change everything.
It's often impossible to see the schwerpunkt except in retrospect. But it's there, and it matters. And when your soldiers have that silly, romantic honour that pushes them to make that one last desperate assault or hang on for that one last desperate moment, well, that's the schwerpunkt. Because that one critical attack succeeded when it should have failed or that one critical unit held the line when it should have broken. Because those guys had the irrational loyalty to give more than their all.
We civilians usually call this heroism, but the men and women who go out there and actually do it invariably insist that they were "just doing their duty". But that duty is not so much to high-minded ideals like God and Country; those are never forgotten, but in the heat of battle the duty at the forefront of every soldier's mind is deadly simple. You give everything you've got for your buddies and they do the same for you. You're all in it together, to the bitter end if need be. No one runs. No one gets left behind.
We often describe the LGBT movement as a cultural war for equal rights. Well, it's long past time that we made that rhetoric into reality and began adopting the tactical and strategic lessons of warfare. Because, let's face it, waging war is something humans are horribly good at. And the first lesson is that we don't shoot each other in the back because we're worried there might not enough to go around. We make enough to go around.
No one gets left behind.