Capable of serving the greater good

I hope you've heard about the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell a couple days ago (though if you watch Fox News, maybe you didn't). Jim Burroway notes we are now free of legally approved governmental investigations into our love lives. Sure, we don't have equality yet -- no marriage equality, no adoption rights, no job protections -- but we no longer face investigations because of who we are.

As a sign of the end of the military ban, a marine recruiter set up a booth at the gay community center in Tulsa. He talked to a handful of lesbians.

Nathaniel Frank, writing in Huffington Post Politics, comments on the end of DADT.

That's why the right wing fixated on gays in the military -- because if the world could see that gay men and women were proud, effective warriors, and were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, it would shatter the careful apparatus of myths they'd spent generations creating, the fiction that said gay people were only interested in their own pleasure and not, in equal parts to everyone else, in the noble effort to serve the greater good. It would shatter the myth that gay people are incapable of self-sacrifice and unworthy of first-class citizenship.

Frank goes on to say our work isn't done yet. Savor the victory and get back to work.