At Harvard, many students and faculty members are hostile to military and R.O.T.C. training because the military discriminates against gays. It's a fair point, and the discrimination is worth fighting. But it was the American military that deposed the Taliban, the most viciously anti-gay regime in the world, one that executed gays by knocking over walls on top of them. America's military does discriminate against gays and is a bastion of anti-gay attitudes, but it has also done more for gay rights ?albeit in Afghanistan ?then all the gay organizations in the Ivy League put together.

lol this guy is a joker... what he is basically saying is since homophobic US Military dropped a couple of daisy clusters on Taliban they are as good as saints even if they discriminate against gays at home. Wow! Because of jokers like this I get all my Comedy Central from NYT itself.

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The proportion of gays in the military is about the same as it is in the civilian world, and I don't think it's much more or less homophobic than our society in general.

The average Marine (the branch I was in, and oddly enough, or not, also the one with the highest percentage of gay enlistees) is around twenty, maybe a bit younger. That means that most of them today have been raised in a political and social environment much more tolerant of gays.

The problem, I think, lies primarily in the upper ranks of the Pentagon, and among cowardly political leaders (yes, I mean the President and Congress) that have failed to officially acknowledge what the majority of the lower ranks have come to accept as irrelevant.

During my time of service, ('78-'86) a time during which gays were still subject to investigation and prosecution in the military, I knew several members of the Corps and the Navy that were openly, if not flamboyantly, gay. No one thought much of it.