Military Service as a Civil Rights Frontier
Like pretty much every decent person I know, I was outraged to find out--via tweet, no less--that our president has decided to ban transgender people from military service. This is one more example of the casual afterthought with which this administration erases civil rights and is an absolute outrage. I also agree with those who commented this morning that simultaneous occurrence of bad things (efforts to deny healthcare to millions of Americans and efforts to marginalize trans people) does not imply that one is a "distraction" from the other. It is pouring bad news, and these are just two of those. And yet, I always find myself uneasy when our civil rights struggle revolves around military service. My discomfort stems, I imagine, from having grown up in an extremely militarized country, in which two massive fictions govern the idea of service: that everyone must serve (i.e., that the army is moral and ethical and is busy defending a small democracy in a sea of hostile c...