09/22/10 – Jeremy Sapienza – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the dang old show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Oh, sorry.
Apparently, I had that ACDC song playing way too low for you guys over in the chaos crowd.
Pardon me.
Anyway, that's the way it is.
I'm Scott.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Jeremy Sapienza.
He's senior editor at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jeremy.
How you doing, man?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Pretty good.
Good.
Well, I appreciate you joining us today, especially on the short notice here.
I was wondering, what is gay rights anyway?
Is that different than just regular rights?
Well, it depends on who you're talking to.
Gay rights can be anything from just the same rights that everybody else has, or special rights to do things that straight people can't.
I guess it depends on who you ask.
Christians will tell you that second thing, probably, and gays will say the first thing.
Now, I learned as a kid, well, in high school anyway, almost a teenager, that feminism is the radical belief that women are human beings.
Okay, so that's fine.
That makes me a feminist, then.
I guess I'm all for gay rights.
Being a gay rights activist means I think gay people are human beings.
Is that basically it?
Right.
You have the same rights as everybody else?
To me, that's what it should be, and I don't think it's anything different.
However, there's something new now.
Well, it's not new, but there's another right that they've added on top of this, and that seems to be the right to kill people for the empire.
Don't ask, don't tell.
Now, the Democrats tried to repeal it yesterday in the Senate and failed, right?
They did.
They did, despite Lady Gaga's moving, yet mealy-mouthed video.
You must be gay.
You're the first person to ever say that lady's name on my show.
Well, I hope I'm the last.
Me too.
I still don't know a single song by her, and we're going to keep it that way.
All right.
Don't ask, don't tell.
That was the Bill Clinton compromise, right?
There used to be a rule, if you're gay, that's it.
You're out of the military.
Forget about it.
And then Clinton made the compromise, right?
Right.
The way the story is, they used to use all resources that they had to root out anybody that they suspected was gay.
And Clinton said, look, let's just knock it off.
I'm not going to say that you have to have openly gay people in the military, but we're just going to say that they can't be openly gay, and you can't waste resources trying to root them out.
And that was the end of it.
Although, you know, they really did continue to root them out and spend resources on investigations and stuff.
But yeah, that was the compromise, at least, you know, officially.
Well, pardon me, we've heard lots of stories about, say, for example, Arabic translators, right?
There was that guy who was one of the best language people that they had, and they got rid of him, and that kind of led to all this protest.
Right.
Well, it seems stupid to me if you say you're fighting a civilizational war on terrorism against very dangerous enemies who speak Arabic, and you are firing people because they're gay, even though they're really the only ones who even speak the language of the people who you're trying to go after, the people who you're listening in on.
It's bonkers.
Well, and, you know, maybe I assume too much here, and you can set me straight, but it would seem to me like most gay people in America would not be conservatives.
If for no other reason than, I mean, I know there are log cabin Republicans, fiscal conservatives, and that kind of thing, but, you know, wouldn't it be the case that, you know, I don't know, seven or eight out of ten gay people in America would lean left towards civil liberties and that kind of thing?
So I don't understand.
It seems like there's a real incongruence between the wanting to participate in what seems to be conservatives' violent conflicts overseas by people who I would guess would, you know, if I had to flip a coin or whatever, take a stab in the dark, I think that they would be against it.
Right.
Well, in fact, a lot of my friends, I do happen to live in a little cultural bubble here in New York, and I understand that, but I literally don't know anybody who is pro-war, literally, in my, you know, IRL life, I don't know anybody who's for war.
However, people are so, oh, and I also know people who are totally for gay rights, no matter what it is.
But then it reaches a kind of contradictory meeting point between gay rights and being against war.
And you have where they demand that gay people be allowed to, quote, serve in the military.
And I try to explain to them that this is, I don't know, schizophrenic?
To say that you're against war and yet gay people should still have the right to participate in it is kind of crazy.
And that they think that this is, that gay rights are more important than the right not to be murdered by a drone missile, say.
Yeah, well, and that's the thing, right, is to, I guess if you want to jump into this debate on the side of let gays in the military, then you kind of have to put aside all your objections to the era of the phony wars and aggressive imperialism and just pretend like this is World War II and we're off to fight the Nazis and everything's fine.
I mean, hell, Obama's for the war, so it's got to be good.
Right, well, I mean, these people are mostly just passively anti-war, and probably mostly because they were really Bush's wars.
So Bush started them, he's an evil Republican, therefore they were probably bad.
They don't know much about them.
I happen to know this for a fact, they literally do not know anything about our foreign policy.
They don't much care.
They only really care that a Republican did something and it's violent and Republicans like violence, so it's probably bad.
So they just take that position as an axiom and they go from there.
So it doesn't matter that Obama's taken over and escalated these same wars, it just matters that a Republican started them, so they're pretty sure they don't like it.
They don't think much about it, though, in general.
What they do think about are things that affect them, their creature comforts and things that hurt their little feelings.
One of those things is how gays are treated by the government in this country.
And I'm not going to say that they're wrong all the time.
Actually, they're probably usually not.
And on the marriage thing, whatever, I don't care one way or the other, but it seems that if we're going to have a way to get out of taxes for straight people, that gay people should be able to do the same thing.
But don't feel too strongly about it.
They do, however.
In fact, for some of these people, that's their entire lives.
They're with the tape over their face for the Prop 8 thing and just on and on.
And whenever something happens that even has to do tangentially with gay rights, they're all over it.
Facebook page lights up.
That always surprised me, I guess.
It shouldn't surprise me.
Everybody, like you say, they're interested in their own interests.
But, you know, like in 2004, it seemed like, God, there could not have been a worse time for the organized gay activist community to say this is the year of gay rights.
Like, really?
Aren't you sure that don't you think for a minute that maybe this is the year to not provoke every single right wing Christian to come out and vote to reelect George Bush?
Couldn't we do without energizing the religious right just once?
Couldn't we make this not about your particular interest just once in the interest of trying to prevent our civilization from committing mass suicide here?
No.
2004 is the year of the gays.
No, the answer is no, they can't.
Everything is about them.
The most important thing in the world is how what they do sexually relates to the world.
Oh, man, we got music already?
We got music already, but we're going to take a short break.
We're going to take a short break and then we're going to come back, talk some more with Jeremy Sapienza, senior editor of Antiwar.com about gays in the military.
Don't ask.
Don't tell.
Or go ahead.
Why do you want to go ahead to people anyway?
All right.
Hang tight, Jeremy.
We'll be right back.
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You've never seen my attitude in the press.
That's what bugs me.
You've never seen my point of view.
For instance, gays in the military.
Now, I don't know how y'all feel about it.
Gays want to be in the military.
Here's how I feel about it.
All right?
Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in.
End of fucking story.
That should be the only requirement.
I don't care how many push-ups you can do.
Put on a helmet.
Go wait in that foxhole.
We'll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.
You know what I mean?
I'm so sick.
I've watched these fucking congressional hearings and all these military guys and all the pundits.
Seriously.
The esprit de corps will be affected.
And we are such a moral...
Excuse me.
Aren't y'all fucking hired killers?
Shut up!
You are thugs.
When we need you to go pull the fuck out of a nation of little brown people, we'll let you know.
Until then...
Where did the fucking military go?
We are the military.
Is that a village of children and kids?
Where's the navel?
I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids.
All right.
There's some Bill Hicks for you.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I've got Jeremy Sapienza on the line.
He's the senior editor at antiwar.com.
What do you think of that?
That's pretty good.
You heard that before?
No, I haven't.
I like the part where he said the criteria should be if you want to be in the military, you're disqualified.
Yeah.
Well, I'll have to send you some links to some Bill Hicks stuff, Jeremy.
Remind me.
I will.
That's him at damn near his best right there.
And, yeah, so I don't know.
Yeah, the whole incongruence, it seems like.
And, you know, what the hell do I know?
I guess some gay guys are really butch and mean kind of guys, but I tend to think of like feminine qualities of gay men, and it's not, it doesn't seem very militaristic on its face, the idea of being gay, you know?
But I guess maybe those things don't have anything to do with each other, and I'm just speaking from ignorance here, you know?
Yeah, you're talking like a Texan.
Well, I mean, I kind of, I guess the point I was trying to make before is like, you know, speaking of Texans, like all the Americans that the urban gay hates in the so-called flyover, they also don't think about their fellow human beings in the rest of the world.
All that matters is how gay characters are represented on sitcoms, or not necessarily what their government is doing in their name in other countries around the world, horrendous things that don't have any purpose.
And kill gay and straight people, too.
You know, I mean, we've covered at AntiWar.com in the past, not just the bombs going off, but the severe oppression of gays in Iraq now, for example, compared to how it was before, right?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
I mean, everybody's suffering over there because of lots of blowback from all kinds of things having to do with our invasion, and it's way, way worse for gays over there.
Yeah, I mean, we blow them up and tell them this is democracy, and part of our democracy is, you know, we're accepting of gay people and stuff, so that's what we're going to foist on you.
And then what we get instead is McTottle-Sauder death squads saying, nuh-uh.
Yeah, yeah, the gays are really loving that new freedom up in Sauder City.
Yeah, I'm sure.
All right, well, so, I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.
I really have never paid that much attention to the subject, because I have that same sort of cynical point of view as you.
Like, what do you mean your right to go and cash a government paycheck murdering innocent people?
Like, what right to be in the military?
What right is that, you know?
Right, well, like I said, again, all that matters is what happens here and what, I guess, they can get over on right-wing Christians, which, in a way, I'd like to just play the other side of this.
In a way, I would also have been okay if they had repealed the ADT, because then you'd have gays in the military, and they always say, oh, we wouldn't hurt morale.
Well, hell yes, you would hurt morale, and that's why you should be in the military.
Just to make all the other soldiers uncomfortable, huh?
Just to make the soldiers uncomfortable and absolutely to destroy morale, because, come on, who are you kidding?
Gays in the military?
Mixed units of gays and straights in the military?
The military?
The United States military?
You think they're just going to be, oh, yeah, he's just my gay bro.
What are you, are you crazy?
It will absolutely affect morale.
It will destroy morale.
Like I said, Jeremy, I love you, man, in a perfectly hetero, Bush, beer, tall boy, drinking kind of way, dude.
That's hilarious.
Yes.
So anything else on this issue?
I mean, I don't even know.
We could switch to something more important if you've got something else, or if you don't.
But I don't know what else to ask you about this.
There's more.
There's more, I guess, that I would want to say about it.
I mean, I can't say enough about how selfish it is and how ignorant and how narrow-minded, really, it is, that they just care about – I mean, there's just no argument that they can make that it makes sense that gay people should have the right to join the U.S. kill cult, that they could go around the world and murder people and send drones and tax denny cams and evaporate children with missiles because straight people can do it.
What the hell does that mean?
What does gay rights mean anymore?
What did it ever mean?
It erases all the other human rights arguments that they could have possibly had.
It completely negates them when they start talking about the right to be in the military.
Yes.
Well, that's a very important point.
And although I want to emphasize, too, and you've said this before, but there's nothing particularly selfish about gay people, and this is the exact same mindset as the rest of America.
Of course.
My point is that they are the same as the people that they hate in middle America.
They are the same.
They have the same selfish, narrow attitude.
They don't give a shit about anybody in the rest of the world.
They assume that their government is doing good by them and in their name.
And they want to serve their country, of course, the country full of people that they mostly hate.
But, again, this kind of schizophrenic understanding of their country doesn't receive any critical attention from them.
I love my country.
I hate most of the people in it.
But I love my country, and I want to serve it.
Do you know what happens when you're in the military?
Do you know what you're asked to do?
Do you care?
No.
All that you care about is that you get a chance to do it just like straight people do.
And, to me, that's selfish, juvenile, bratty, illegitimate, unintelligent point of view and way to see the world.
Well, and, you know, the other thing, too, is here we're talking about people who, throughout history, have been terribly oppressed.
It's like a black guy becoming a cop.
Like, what are you doing, man?
You know?
You, of all people, ought to be able to see through this.
Right.
I mean, unlike a black guy becoming a cop, you can be a good cop if you choose to.
You can't choose to be a good soldier except for Bradley Manning, and then you end up in jail.
Well, yeah, and that's a really important point, too, is that, you know, you could argue, anyone could argue, that you've got some kind of need for a domestic security force of one kind or another here.
But for a world empire, not so much.
Yeah.
Well, I sure appreciate your perspective on this.
I wish they'd interview you on TV or something and get in a big fight.
Are there any, like, organized gay groups that fight about Don't Ask, Don't Tell for more of your point of view?
Do you know?
No, man.
No, no, no.
No, it's just a given.
It's just that gays have the right to serve in the military.
I mean, why else would some pop icon like Lady Gaga take her makeup off and do a video beseeching McCain, like he's going to listen to her, stutter through reading a bunch of cards on a YouTube video about how important it is for gays to be able to kill Pakistani babies.
It's bonkers.
It's just really insane.
And as I said, I guess the main point is that all their arguments about human rights aspects of gay rights is erased with this.
And they don't care because of American exceptionalism.
Well, yeah, and that really is the most important point, that ultimately if we're into devaluing people for who they are, whether it's based on nationality or whether it's based on race or religion or sexual things, anything else, along those lines, there's blowback for everyone.
Yeah, man, and it doesn't stop at the border.
Right, exactly.
So it's the Mexicans, and we've seen this.
The Republican Party are masters at this.
Whoever is weak and powerless, the Mexicans, gays, Muslims, anybody, that's who they point at.
And as you say, it's the very same mindset of pointing at the people of Iraq or Iran or Pakistan and saying it's okay to oppress them.
It's the very same thing, isn't it?
Yep.
All right.
Well, you sure say it well, and I appreciate it.
And thank you for your time on the show today, Jeremy.
All right.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Jeremy Sapienza, Senior Editor at AntiWar.com.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.