According to the article, all Turkish men are required to serve at least six months in the army, which seems a perfectly sensible obligation in this war torn world. Surely they are capable of training and carrying out their other duties without their sexuality being an issue? That the military does not want soldiers behaving in an overtly effeminate manner seems reasonable. In the past it is likely that anyone readily identified as effeminate would have been rejected anyway.

This suggests that those interviewed here are simply young men claiming a taste for passive homosexuality as a means of avoiding national service; the fact that they do have such predilections is really neither here nor there since it is not necessary or desirable to have people exposing their sexuality during a six-month training period, military or otherwise. What this actually reflects may be a newfound antipathy for national service. Since homosexuality and military service are not mutually exclusive, homosexuality is simply providing a loophole for one group of men to get out of it. As for the system employed to verify the claims, it may well be incomprehensible to the authorities that anyone would seek to avoid such a patriotic obligation and they are likely highly suspicious of it. The issue has simply passed through a mirror so that something designed to exclude flamboyant passive homosexuals from the service is now being employed by some recruits to avoid it.

It is also perfectly understandable that the US, a society riddled with liberalism, would twist the circumstances and seek to make an issue of them.

Turkey is not being asked to deploy against Islamist states or those supporting Islamist terrorists. Turkish troops are only in the softest NATO deployments, like the Balkans. What sort of combat are they trying to avoid by claiming homosexuality?

My last oversea tour in the U.S. Army was in Turkey. My unit was small, about half the personnel were Turks, all of whom had served on active duty, and were still in the reserves, some in their fifties.

Universal Military Service, not a "selective" draft, is the rule. The purpose is to promote national unity among a diverse people,as well as provide a defense force.

I call 'NON-ISSUE.' The article clearly notes that gays are REQUIRED to serve in the military, just like everybody else. This is the very essence of "NON-DISCRIMINATION." "Gayness" is an exceptable issue only if the candidate wishes to contend that he cannot serve because of his disabling gayness. The only ones complaining about their reception in the article here are those males trying to avoid military service by asserting they are too gay to serve - a dubious concept at best. Naturally, it is expected that they will PROVE that they are gay in the first place, and somehow disabled by it in the second. Turkey should solve this by requiring alternative service from those thus 'disabled.'
The article's author surprisingly presents this with a "look at the poor gay victims here" Progressive-Obamanistic approach, but I doubt many people find this particular slant to be persuasive. After all, if you're truly "gay friendly", then how can you define simply being gay as a disability?

Worthwhile read, thx BD.

Forced military service has always been a cousin to imprisonment, in terms of creating scaffolding and atmosphere institutional abuse. Forcing people into barracks or camp conditions creates behavioral anomalies, as well as a breeding ground for disease. At the end of the Azerbaijan-Armenian war, tuberculosis in the ranks was running around 30%.

In the US basic training system, recruits used to be stressed to the point where they're almost certain to contract a cold or flu during training, making that part of the 'normal' indoctrination experience. What goes round, comes round. Literally. Like the 1918 pandemic.

The 21st century wars are coming home, in ways potentially far worse than suicide jihadism.

who care about all that ,this article didnt give us any new information.
, we all know that turkey try to look good all the time with the freedom and equall rights, but the true (that we all know )is that
turkey is an old fashion country ,corrupt government ,control by the islam, the baby of iran.
no wonder the eurupian union dont want any part of this shithole.

if there are any turks that listen , leave the country now!! specially if you are a woman, soon you will all have to cover your had and all other part of your body, your governmant talk about love and peace--,all lies. what happan with the kurds!!, why this is the only county that is friend with iran!!!!!!

what im trying to say is that this article didnt give us any new information.
this country in the last few years is based on hate ,lies,and discrmination.
the public need to wake up before it will be too late and base on teror!!

Public opinion and beliefs in the US now decidedly favor gays serving in the military to include of course in combat roles. This is a rapid and dynamic reversal of previous attitudes held over the past several generations.

The fact is, as Gen Wesley Powell and many other US brass hats have noted often and over time, including the present Joint Chiefs of Staff and its chairman, gays always have served in the US military, from the initial skirmishes against native Americans from 1620, to include of course the "Big One," WW II and up to the present, gays have served in the military. The official US prohibition against gays in the military is only a phenomenon of very recent US history. US law had previously been silent, neutral, on the issue. Indeed throughout history, and especially In modern, sophisticated societies and cultures, laws reflect the fact that gays in the military is not an inherent problem, or a cultural or military issue at all.

To its detriment the current government of Turkeys continues to remove itself increasingly from Europe, in particular membership of the European Union, and from rational secular human values and diversity in general. They miss the point that diversity is a strength, that homogeneity is a limitation, a self confining and self retarding constriction.

Well done to the article above for pointing out that this former viable EU candidate state Turkey (and it certainly is Turkey) is being, in my words, reactionary in more ways than one. Although a significant omission by the notable writer is the views of the Turkey military in the matter, to include the views of the Turkey high command; more importantly the officer ranks and the rank and file of the enlisted military personnel. I mean, for thousands of years, as in every other country on the planet, Turkish military combatants gay and straight have fought side by side against their foreign enemy. The military record and the teachings at major military academies in advanced societies do not specifically single out gay combatants as somehow inherently incapable or as unreliable. There is nothing of the sort.

The US being a democracy, its military was just recently polled in confidentiality and the results are conclusive that gays are trusted, as they have been trusted throughout (all of) history to be reliable comrades in arms. The fact is that In the military we know sooner or later who is gay and it almost always makes no difference in our attitudes towards gay military comrades. Indeed, history clearly and indisputably shows the Spartans promoted and encouraged -- I say history records the Spartans promoted and encouraged -- homosexuality among its fierce combatants as a way and means of fostering a greater unified and interdependent fighting spirit. The Buddhist country of Thailand, as one such instance, encourages separate gay military units, not because of discrimination, but because they, as with the Spartan combat units have a homosexual affinity that causes them to fight more fiercely for one another, which military strategists/tacticians agree is the primary motive in the immediate ferocity of battle. Segregation gay military units is not necessarily an imperative or desirable, it's just that the point of comraderie and esprit de corps is further clarified and enhanced by the military policy of the Thai government.

As with every fiercely religious theistic people everywhere, the Muslim Jurks or Turkey have much to learn, appreciate and to acquire concerning human beings and the human condition, which of course certainly means human rights and respect. The burden on the Turks remains great and heavy in this respect.

There can be no question the Islamic government of Turkeys is searching out and making clear to Turkey generals that, in order to advance through the ranks -- i.e., become religious-political generals -- they must support and toe the strict theistic Islamic line that homosexuals cannot serve in the military if they can prove they have, in the ancient and decrepit discredited idea, a behavioral disorder, that they are mentally, morally socially defective.

The Turkeys in the government of the country are enforcing notions of the awful and exclusive, moribund past that are rooted in ignorance and which would take us back both in time and in precious human progress attained at great cost and sacrifice. While the Turkey Islamists don't cut anything off in this respect, they do reduce human beings and their human dignity to abnomible levels, and they so so shamelessly and with great self righteosness.

Pathetic; reactionary.

The subject of this article was already covered in der spiegel.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,726903,00.html
I think it is dishonest, to say the least, to cover the same subject without referring to your source. In academia it is called plagiarism.
Majority of FP readers may not speak in German, but they are not stupid.
The smell of plagiarism is rotten and something that FP readers surely do not aim for...

so we all agree
this guy copy an old story that was compose by some one else,
i knew it !!!
i heard the same story long time ago, i agree with ncgds.
where is the decency?!!
let me give you an edvice

don't copy

shame, shame,shame.