Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Tuesday, December 23

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From GPU News (Milwaukee, WI), December 1977, page 52.

The Wreck Room Bar opened in July 1972 as the city’s first cowboy/levi/leather bar. It had three rooms and a small outdoor patio, and in keeping with the “wreck” theme, a back room featured a T-Bird’s front end sticking out of a wall and the room with the pool table was decorated with hub caps and chain link fencing. Barrels of free peanuts were set around the bar and the floor was littered with shells. By the following year, it was the home base for the Silver Star Motorcycle Club which later morphed into a leather club. Its anniversary parties were legendary. Beginning around 1976, two streets surrounding the bar were blocked off for a free corn roast and brat/burger fry. The bar also sponsored the Wreck Room Classic invitation softball tournament on Memorial Day weekends.

By the late 1980s, the death of one of the owners from AIDS, competition from other bars, the neighborhood’s redevelopment coinciding with the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s rehabbing an old industrial building across the street all contributed to the bar’s slide. The Wreck Room hosted its final anniversary party in 1994, and its building was purchased by the design school and converted into a student center.

TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Wild Bill Dannemeyer’s Op-Ed on Gays in the Military: 1991. “Dob’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers, has been gone since 2011 (see Sep 20), and the controversy surrounding gays serving openly has largely disappeared. But in 1991, the debate was well underway over whether the Defense Department should rescind its decades-long policy of prohibiting gays in the military. In the pre-DADT era, the ban was a matter of DoD policy, not the law. Conservatives then, as now, wanted to keep the ban in place, and few were more hard core about it — or more obnoxious — than Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-CA). On December 23, 1991, he was true to form in his op-ed lambasting gay people with his usual class:

A very poor joke asks: What is meaner than a pit bull with AIDS? The guy who gave the dog AIDS, of course. This could be the fightingest son-of-a-gun in the whole Army. But should he be?

I have seen how aggressive the lunatics of ACT-UP can be-rioting in the streets, smashing windows, fighting with anyone in disagreement-and have often thought how effective they might be on the front lines of combat. But does this prowess and compunction for destruction automatically certify the few and the proud?

…Many people still believe that homosexual sodomy is a perverse behavior, that someone choosing to do so isn’t playing with a full deck. Survey after survey of military personnel supports this belief. …For homosexuals to blame others for reacting adversely to their chosen lifestyle is absurd. The notion of punishing “homophobes” (the label applied to people who find homosexual sodomy repugnant) in the military as perverts rather than those persons who define their very existence by a sex act is itself perverse…

Those were the arguments against gays in the military in the early 1990s. When Bill Clinton ran for President, he promised to overturn the ban. But as soon as he was sworn into office, he ran into a buzz saw of opposition led by fellow Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia. In 1993, Congress shifted the ban from administrative policy to legal imperative with the passage of the Defense Authorization Bill, which included the codification of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law. According to Servicemembers United, 14,346 soldiers, sailors and airmen/women would be discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” over the next eighteen years.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

And feel free to consider this your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?