Ackerman's Lesbian Platoon
by Steve Ralls

Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-NY) has an idea for Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice: Have the State Department hire all those gay linguists booted from military service. In fact, hire a whole platoon of lesbians!

Yesterday, during hearings on the State Department's 2008 budget request, Ackerman noted that Secretary Rice repeatedly emphasized the importance of recruiting qualified language experts to work in the agency. Remembering that the armed forces have fired more than 300 language experts (including at least 55 fluent in Arabic), Ackerman wondered, "Can we marry up those two — or maybe that's the wrong word — can we have some kind of union of those two issues?"

"I'm not aware of the availability of people, but I certainly will look [at] what we are doing right now," Rice responded.

"But maybe you might find some of those competent people among those who are recently unemployed," Ackerman replied.

But it was the Congressman's clear disguist for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the military ban that led to those dismissals, that has everyone in Washington buzzing:

"Well, it seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages — Farsi and Arabic, etc.," Ackerman said. "For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists. ... If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad."

Perhaps it is the United States that needs the platoon of lesbians, however, given recruiting problems, retention problems and mounting concerns about meeting calls for an even bigger military in the year ahead.

As we noted in our press release yesterday, Congressman Ackerman may be onto something. We have a few (in fact, more than a few) discharged linguist clients who'd be happy to talk with Secretary Rice.