Expensive Luxuries

by digby

It’s much in vogue these days to rend one’s garments about government spending but for some reason nobody seems to have a problem with this:

Since 1994, DADT has resulted in the discharge of more than 13,000 military personnel across the services, including approximately 800 with skills deemed “mission critical,” such as pilots, combat engineers, and linguists. According to a 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office, “the cost of discharging and replacing service members fired because of their sexual orientation during the policy’s first 10 years totaled at least $190.5 million — roughly $20,000 per discharged service member.

Doesn’t that seem like an awful lot of money just to appease a bunch of social conservatives?

Sadly, that paragraph was excerpted from a post at Think Progress about the first discharge of a “mission critical” gay soldier by the Obama administration.