The End of Don't Ask Don't Tell

The End of Don't Ask Don't Tell

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on September 16, 2010.

Of all the divisions of the U.S. government, the military is likely the most conservative, in this context meaning cautious and resistant to change. But the military must reflect society, and eventually, it does change. First, the military integrated on racial lines. Then it allowed women to serve alongside men in non-combat roles.

Aside from women serving in combat, there is only one major barrier to military service for an entire class of people: homosexuality.

Despite the fact that the same moot canard has been used against other classes of people, such as persons of color and women, the most common reason for forbidding service to openly gay persons is "unit cohesion". The theory is that if a unit was aware that a gay person was serving with them, that unit would not function as a unit. It would, in fact, be at risk of tearing itself apart.

I always found this theory to be a bit insulting. I was asked to serve alongside farm boys and inner city kids, with whom I had very little in common personally. Face it - we all have prejudices, and I am no exception to this truism. But in becoming a platoon, we each had to overcome our prejudices to bond as a unit.

Just as there are dyed-in-the-wool racists who will never change, and have no place in our military, there will be those who will never accept homosexuals as equals. The solution is to weed those people out, not to prevent homosexuals from serving their country.

The anti-homosexual policy in the military went through a shift in 1993. A policy commonly known as Don't Ask Don't Tell was put into place. The practical effect of DADT was that the military would not ask its personnel to say if they were homosexual or not. In exchange, service members would not say or acknowledge if they were gay or not.

At the time, it seemed a reasonable compromise and it probably was. The effect, however, is that the policy required homosexual people to lie to the service, to themselves, to their friends, and to their families about who they were. Upon reflection, these restrictions seem unfair.

In a time of war, the policy also proved problematic. Any soldier who was revealed to be homosexual was subject to discharge - even if that soldier filled a critical role, such as Arabic translator. As of 2007, 58 Arabic linguists had been ousted from service because of DADT.

Beginning in 2001, the DADT policy was modified so that it would not be enforced against service members serving in combat zones. The rationale was the these personnel were too critical to the mission to lose any of them to the policy. This fact played a pivotal role in a recent federal district court ruling in California, which struck down the entire DADT policy as unconstitutional.

As Judge Virgina Phillips ruled, if unit cohesion is important in times of peace, it would seem to be doubly so in times of war, in a combat zone. Yet the military did not increase or tighten enforcement of the policy, it relaxed it. Having a valued member of a team pulled out of that team has more of a negative effect on the unit than the unit discovering a member is gay - something most of the members of the team might have known or suspected anyway.

If my experience in the military taught me nothing, it is that people of disparate backgrounds can, and will, come together as a team. It should be no surprise that members of our military can accept a gay service member as easily as anyone else.

Our military exists to protect our liberty from those who would take it from us. It is an arm of a political system that is based on personal freedom. The DADT policy violates the First Amendment rights of gay service members. It puts our nation and other members of the service at risk. And it is an affront to our national pride in a quality that we say we admire: that a young man or woman would risk his or her life to serve their country.

We should all celebrate and support Judge Phillips's ruling, then drink a toast to the end of DADT. Next up, the last vestiges of discrimination: allowing women to serve in combat and to register for the draft.