Gays in the Military: Don't ask don't tell repealed! -The iPINIONS Journal

I don’t know why anyone would want to serve in the U.S. military these days – when chances are very good that he or she will be shipped right out to the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. All the same, I celebrate the belated recognition of gays and lesbians to do so … openly:

The government’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is a violation of due process and First Amendment rights. Instead of being necessary for military readiness, the policy has a direct and deleterious effect on the armed services…

In order to justify the encroachment on these rights, defendants [the U.S government] faced the burden at trial of showing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act was necessary to significantly further the government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion. Defendants failed to meet that burden.

(From ruling of U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips, The Washington Post, September 10, 2010)

In an unusual session on Saturday, the U.S. Senate effectively ratified Judge Phillips’s landmark ruling when it voted to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act (DADT), which amounted to state-sanctioned discrimination against gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.

DADT was implemented early in the Clinton administration as a way of accommodating the homophobia that prevailed amongst top military brass back then. This, notwithstanding that:

Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar… You don’t have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.

(Conservapedia)

This very famous and compelling quote is attributed to “Mr. Conservative” Barry Goldwater, the former senator and Republican Party’s nominee for president in 1964. Therefore, it speaks volumes that a liberal president like Bill Clinton felt compelled to implement DADT in a misguided attempt to appease military leaders.

Meanwhile, gay activists have rightly argued all along that this treatment was akin to the segregation of blacks in the military. This is why its repeal is no less than a belated recognition of the civil right of gays and lesbians to serve openly.

Not to mention what a cut-nose-to-spite-face policy this was. Not least because, pursuant to it, the military has discharged over 13,000 service members, including, most notably, hundreds of highly trained linguists whose fluency in Arabic would have been instrumental in helping the U.S. Army bridge the language barrier that has so bedeviled its nation-building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In any event, I am convinced that the same civil right that now allows gays and lesbians to serve openly should also allow them to get married … legally. After all, this too is akin to anti-miscegenation laws that once banned interracial marriages between whites and blacks.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have commented extensively on the metamorphosis of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) – since he lost his presidential bid to Barack Obama – from an open-minded, “mavericky” politician who took pride in opposing his party’s orthodoxy, into a narrow-minded, me-too partisan who now takes sycophantic pleasure in championing the Republican Party’s conservative policies.

This has led to the unseemly spectacle of McCain publicly disavowing many of his once-strongly held views. Most notable in this respect was the mockery he made of his erstwhile support for immigration reform by suddenly exhorting the government to “build the dang fence”.

Unfortunately, McCain’s antic flip-flops also extended to gays and lesbians serving in the military. For, despite standing shoulder to shoulder with Obama in the vanguard of those calling for the repeal of DADT, he soon became the poster boy for continuing this bigoted and anachronistic policy.

It is helpful to know that after a 10-month review, the Pentagon concluded that:

The risk of repeal of Don’ Ask, Don’t Tell to overall military effectiveness is low.

(The Washington Post, November 30, 2010)

Nevertheless, in his “neo-segregationist” diatribe during Saturday’s historic debate, McCain compounded his new-found prejudice by propagating the demonstrably false notion that repeal will cause “severe damage” to military effectiveness. And, to add insult to injury, he insinuated that it is motivated by a political agenda – not to advance a civil right but to engage in a social experiment.

This led a columnist for the Washington Monthly to write yesterday that: