A Response.

In Renata Green's blog about obesity, she opened it up with a bit of a story from her past. I really appreciated this as it gave a few laughs, some likelihoods to my own childhood, and an insight on a better way of eating. This opening gave a light-hearted attention grabber to her post, which is a very good technique to use.

She then moves on to the situation (and purpose) of the post. Obesity is being fought by a new bill (The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act) recently passed by the House of Representatives. The bill only needs President Obama's signature to be passed into the state of a law. All this information was easily understood and taken in from my perspective. She made it simple, stated what it was and how it happened. Keeping points clear and simple for readers is a very important thing to do while blogging.

Moving onto what the bill is going to do, she (again) made everything very clear and crisp. Explaining how the law will help fix how school lunches are run, vending machines in school areas, free lunches for poverty striken kids, and providing funding for creation of school run gardens as well as purchasing of locally grown produce.

This bill (to be a law) seems great and I am happy it's going to be (more than likely) passed soon. I would however like to stress the fact that it is mainly a parents responsibility for what their child eats. Just like Green stated in her opening, her parents did all they could to keep her away from "normal" (aka Junk) food.

So... WHY is this still in effect again?

I'm assuming many of you have recently heard a lot about the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and how it's being repealed soon. If you haven't heard about it, it's basically a twelve year old policy that stops gays, lesbians and bisexuals from being open about their sexual orientation or speaking of homosexual relationships and actions while serving in the military.

Now that I've started this you might be thinking, "Oh jeez, here goes another person with another standard rant about how this is unconstitutional and how the government needs to hurry and repeal it, and blah blah blah." Except you would be wrong! (If you weren't thinking that, kudos to you)

My stance on this . . .

Yup, that's right. The United States government is going the wrong way. We're supposed to be stopping discrimination not letting it stay in place for as long as possible. The real problem I'm having with this situation is not that it's taking so long to repeal, but the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to remove a stay on the decision of an appellate court. A decision that could(and most likely would) repeal the policy. When news of this first reached me, my reaction was quite . . . annoyed.

The Supreme Court is supposed to help solve the problems and get things taken care of. When they allowed this lower court to continue to stay their decision, they allowed a discriminative policy to stay in place for a longer amount of time. A policy that requires replacements to be made, therefore costing quite a bit of money.

It's not only about how wrong it is, it's the fact that it's costing the United States more money. We're already in debt; why waste more money dismissing PERFECTLY able-bodied soldiers because they happen to be homosexual? It's a waste of US services, money, and time(as well as being idiotic).