Here are two hypothetical situations:
1) A man has been ordered to leave his home and the people who love him. He has been deployed, ordered to spend months in a city among people who hate him. He is in the U.S. Army. There is no way for him to know who is an enemy and who is a civilian until it could be too late; he knows this. His intense distrust edges over to abject terror every time his mind unavoidably conjures up another obvious “what if”. During a time of awaiting the next orders, which he fears could be his last, he begins to record a message for his girlfriend and young children.
Would you have tried to tell him to "shut up" before he said the word "girlfriend"? Would you want him to be fired if he said it because it is wildly inappropriate to imply sexual orientation in the U.S. military?
2) A woman fights for her country, on a dangerous landscape far from home. She is in the U.S. Army. As time goes on and the opposition forces mount, she becomes increasingly aware of her clearly escalating risk of death. She already received news of the deaths of some of her friends. Learned helplessness starts to set in. She begins to say, in a flash of overwhelmingly powerful terror, that she misses her wife and their children.
Would you have tried to tell her to "shut up" before she says the word "wife"? Would you want her to be fired if she said it, because it is wildly inappropriate to imply sexual orientation in the U.S. military?
Yes, they are emotionally loaded hypothetical stories. To ignore the emotional aspect of humanity when you think about this topic is to reduce your understanding of it.
