Homophobia increases terror risk

"I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."
-Jerry Falwell after 9/11

Falwell later retracted this statement, and its easy to see why. It's an idiotic thing to say, not mention tasteless. One's opinion on gays really has no impact on the likelihood that you will b e victimized by terrorists. Or does it? The interesting thing though is that if anything, homophobia is making this a more dangerous place.

How?

Well indirectly through the firing of gay linguists, something that is still happening in the US. Now the military says that it's just trying to uphold the law. I don't buy it, and moreover, I don't care about that particular law. Many of the gays that have been discharged have insisted that they were trying to be discrete. I don't care if those intercepting terrorist communiques are the gayest gays ever. It doesn't matter. Being able to speak the language of the enemy is simply too valuable a skill.

Don't believe me? Remember that here in Canada the Air India bombing could have been prevented if Canada's spy agencies had anyone who could speak Punjabi to translate the intercepts that had already been recorded.

The Tragedy of Errors

(with apologies to William Shakespeare)
I humbly submit that this is what they ought to call the final report of the Air India inquiry. Today we learned that the bomb-sniffing dogs couldn't have found the bomb because all of them, all of them, were at some training thing in Vancouver. Ask a child what is wrong with this, did the RCMP really think that the terrorists would respect this training day?