Politics & Power Quote by Dick Durbin

Durbin’s line does something canny: it borrows the country’s most sanctified moral currency - military sacrifice - and spends it on a group long treated as politically expendable. “Willing to risk their lives” is not just praise; it’s a credential. In a culture that reflexively wraps legitimacy in a uniform, he’s arguing that denying equal treatment to LGBTQ service members isn’t merely unfair, it’s strategically stupid and morally incoherent. The people asked to die for the nation are being told they can’t fully belong to it.

The phrasing is built to disarm predictable objections. He doesn’t lead with abstract rights language that can be dismissed as “special treatment.” He leads with duty and reciprocity: if you’ll defend the country, the country owes you dignity. That’s the subtextual bargain he’s enforcing.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: “orientation - sexual orientation’s been held against them.” The stuttered clarification reads like a deliberate narrowing, anticipating bad-faith conflations (behavior, morality, “lifestyle”) and insisting on the plain fact of identity being used as a weapon. He’s naming discrimination without letting opponents redefine the terms.

Calling it “a blot on our nation’s reputation” internationalizes the stakes. This isn’t just about internal policy; it’s about America’s self-mythology and global branding as a rights-respecting democracy. In context - debates around “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and military inclusion - Durbin frames equality not as cultural experimentation but as national hygiene: remove the stain, align practice with professed values, stop demanding heroism from people you won’t fully honor.