A bit more on Don't Ask Don't Tell

[Guest StuCotts]

Jon Stewart shows in his own way how pointless it is to argue with those for whom gayness is the breaker of all deals. Some few who may not have seen the skit:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jh...Dan-Choi-is-Gay

That link should theoretically take you directly to the Dan Choi clip. If it just takes you to the general video page, look for the title. For the moment it's fourth down.

[Lucky]

Dan Choi is becoming the poster boy for gays in the military. He has been on several tv programs this week as he is being booted from the military after graduating from West Point and serving honorably for ten years. He is a nice-looking, well-spoken man, who actually winked at Anderson Cooper on the air. He claims to have studiously adhered to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for all of these years, only recently finding love and deciding to come out.

I wonder why a guy would want to give up his sexuality for all of those years in order to learn to be, and then be, a killer for the military. He apparently performed well at his tasks and is respected by the men under his command who support his efforts to stay in the military. I like the idea that he claims present law doesn't respect the professionalism of the troops in that it assumes that they cannot handle working with gay men.

In short, especially given that he has learned Arabic ( those smart Asians!), he seems well-suited for the military. I wouldn't want to cross him up on a date, though.

[TampaYankee]

I wonder why a guy would want to give up his sexuality for all of those years in order to learn to be, and then be, a killer for the military.

Throughout time men and women have been moved to give up their sexuality for any of several reasons, one of those being for vocation. So I assume your wonder has to do with being 'a killer for the military'.

This seems to be something of a 'loaded' statement. I'm unaware of any charges of illegal or unsanctioned activites on his part beyond DADT violations.

Some people are moved to serve a cause. Some of those are willing to put their lives on the line for our country if it is deemed essential to our safety, security and preservation of our way of life.

To be clear, he is not a killer for the military. The military are killers for us, if and when we deem that necessary. We charter and underwrite the recruitment, training, equipping and general support for them to protect us and our interests. The fault in that purusit, if there is any, does not lie in the man but in the mission. The mission is way above his pay grade. That responsibility lies more with us than him.

I won't rise to the 'smart asians' comment because I suspect your tongue is in your cheek and longing rather to be up his derriere. Just a guess.

[MsGuy]

Lucky, in my experience gays join the armed services for pretty much the same array of reasons as straights.

Gay servicemen may be more or less in the closet, but I only know of one guy who "gave up his sexuality" and I would attribute that case more to personal conflicts than to life in the military.

That "killer for the military" business spoils an otherwise thoughtful post. Knowing your odd sense of humor, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and read it as a failed attempt at levity.

P.S. Did he really wink at Anderson Cooper?

[Lucky]

My reference reflects my own wonder at why someone would want to be in a military that doesn't want them, and there is no doubt some spillover from my pacifist days.

Choi is a quite self-assured man, and he sure did wink. That's why I think he will be a great spokesman for his cause, and I wouldn't be surprised if the White House offered him a post where his skills could be used.

[MsGuy]

Guys my age (I turned 61 last week) remember when there were almost no jobs that offered a safe haven for gays. If you wanted to be anything other than a hair dresser or a florist, you just had to suck it up and tough it out (pun intended.) I guess that's why I can sympathize with gays in the military.

[Lucky]

Happy birthday. Did you fuck a soldier for the occasion (a gay one)?

[MsGuy]

Happy birthday. Did you fuck a soldier for the occasion (a gay one)?

Well, I would have but the S.O.B. out ran me. Thirty years ago I could have run his ass down. Either I'm slower now or back then they weren't trying so hard to get away.

Back on topic: The 9th Court of Appeals just remanded the Maj. Margaret Whitt case for further proceedings in District Court. Basically the court over-ruled its prior case law and applied a "heightened scrutiny" test to DADT. It held that the Air Force would have to demonstrate that her presence was in fact (not just in theory) disruptive to her reserve unit and that no other reasonable remedy other than discharge was available. Not a home run for our side but certainly a solid single. The opinion can be found at Policylibrary.com/U.S./Human_rights.

[MsGuy]

I'm embarrassed to admit that I never read the actual text of the DADT law until today. I thought the services had at least been discouraged from taking the initiative to ferret out homosexuals.

The only "don't ask" part of the statute is a conditional removal of the "are you queer?" question from the preinduction questionaire. The preamble to the statute is loaded with rank homophobic shit. The rest is a flat out prohibition of service in the military by gay citizens regardless of how closeted they may be. The services are free to interrogate servicemen as much and as often as they like and to conduct deep background investigations to uncover evidence of homo inclinations &/or activity. The only thing beneficial about this is that separated servicemen now usually receive an honorable discharge (& that's not in the statute.)

I keep telling myself not to believe anything the media says and I keep falling for its spin. Damn Clinton for a liar and damn me for a fool for ever listening to him. Geez, I'm so exacerbated with myself.

[AdamSmith]

I keep telling myself not to believe anything the media says and I keep falling for its spin. Damn Clinton for a liar and damn me for a fool for ever listening to him. Geez, I'm so exacerbated with myself.

At the time DADT was put into place, my guess was Clinton was pulling a shrewd one: Once the policy was thus recast to acknowledge that gay people can be effective in military service as long as straight colleagues don't know their orientation, I thought it would become easy for some legal challenge to push it to the next step -- the self-evident conclusion that this is the very definition of prejudice: something that exists purely in the state of mind of the dominant group.

Naive me.

[MsGuy]

The Clintons sucessfully covered a total defeat by hanging a clever tag line on the law, "Don't ask, don't tell." I thought the services had made a gentleman's agreement to allow gays to serve as long as they didn't come out to their units and kept their private life off base, that CID would cease to be used to extract confessions from and dig up evidence on closeted gays.

Instead Congress replaced an executive policy with a statute explicitly based on its Art. 1, Sec. 8 power to "raise, support...and regulate" the military forces of the U.S. Congress could not have erected a stronger barrier to modifying the anti-gay bias of the services. It bound the hands of not only Clinton but of any future president inclined to relax this policy. Short of amending the Constitution itself, Congress could not have made it any more difficult for the courts to find actionable discrimination on the basis of substantive due process or equal protection.

I disregarded the gay activists who red flagged this law. Like AdamSmith, I thought it was about as good as we were likely to get at the time and a step on the way to open service by gays. I should have read the damn law. We were hornswoggled by the simple device of attaching a meaningless title to vicious piece of legislation. Orwell was prescient.

[Lucky]

Another shocking discharge story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aubrey-sarvi...5_b_205553.html

[Guest StuCotts]

Another shocking discharge story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aubrey-sarvi...5_b_205553.html

If this thread becomes a depository for instances of bottomless stupidity in applying Don't Ask Don't Tell, I foresee a very long life for it.

[Lucky]

The LA Times reports that we have essentially been tossed under the bus as Obama cozies up to the generals:

By Carol J. Williams

10:46 PM PDT, May 19, 2009

President Obama's campaign vow to end the ban on gays in the military -- and the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that forces thousands of military personnel to stay in the closet -- appears to be driven now by a strategy of "don't rush."

The recent coming-out by dozens of gay West Point graduates, including Arabic language specialist Lt. Daniel Choi of Tustin, has spotlighted the conflicting policies and put pressure on Congress and the White House to make good on promises to repeal them.

A report issued last week by UC Santa Barbara's Palm Center research institute said Obama had the power to thwart the discharging of military personnel for their sexual orientation. Under the "stop-loss" provision, Obama can issue executive orders to retain any soldier deemed necessary to the service in a time of national emergency, the report said.

The president also could halt the work of Pentagon review panels that brand troops as gay and thus excluded from service, the report said. And Obama and his Defense secretary could revise discharge procedures, as allowed under the 1993 law banning gays in the military.

Choi, who received a notice of discharge this month for publicly disclosing his homosexuality, doesn't want Obama to intercede on his behalf. He wants officials to eliminate obstacles to gays serving their country.

"Why would I be comfortable with him making a special case for me when so many others are getting kicked out?" asked Choi, 28, whose Korean immigrant parents have not accepted his homosexuality.

Those who support openly gay troops point to the loss of important skills, such as Choi's fluency in Arabic and independent study of Persian, as unacceptable costs of an outdated and unfair policy.

But neither Congress nor the White House appears eager to reopen the bitter debate over gays in the military that rocked the early months of the Clinton administration.

"They're caught in a political double bind. If they move too quickly, they will expend political capital with the military and Congress. Yet if they move too slowly, they will alienate a core constituency and fail to deliver on a very clear campaign promise," said Aaron Belkin, director of the UC Santa Barbara institute.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said recently that if the ban were lifted, it would be difficult for the military to restructure its units to accommodate homosexuals. National security advisor James L. Jones Jr. also has reacted coolly to the prospect of lifting the ban.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama recognized that banning gays from the military -- leaving an estimated 65,000 people to serve as long as they don't disclose their homosexuality -- "isn't working for our national interests."

But Gibbs said change required "more than the snapping of one's fingers." He said Obama considered congressional action the best way to ensure real change. He said the president would refrain from issuing executive orders to halt discharges.

Legal analysts differ about whether Obama's intervention would help the cause of integrating gays or hurt it by taking the pressure off Congress to repeal the ban.

"It's better to address the statute itself rather than issue an executive order that would temporarily suspend discharges" and leave lawmakers to think there is no urgency to amend the law, said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which lobbies to end the ban.

Others, like Nathaniel Frank, author of "Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America," see the latest musings on how and when to let gays openly serve as reflecting a fear of tackling a tough issue.

"The military has been passing the buck to Congress by saying, 'This is a congressional issue; we're simply following the law.' But the military was instrumental in insisting that this ban is necessary," Frank said.

He said the policy "is not just a social issue, it's a national security issue in that we are losing people we can't afford to lose."

Since 1994, when "don't ask, don't tell" went into effect, more than 12,500 men and women have been discharged from the armed forces for being gay, including nearly 800 "mission-critical specialists" such as Choi.

In the first decade after the ban was imposed, the Pentagon was forced to spend an estimated $364 million to train replacements for those discharged for sexual orientation, a 2005 Government Accountability Office report said.

At the very least, Sarvis said, Congress should cut the Pentagon budget item for rooting out gays from the military and training replacements.

Obama has said he wants the ban lifted during the current congressional term, but even the most motivated lawmakers see little prospect of swift action.

Democratic U.S. Reps. Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, co-chairs of the newly formed Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus, have said they need to be sure there is majority support for repealing the ban before beginning debate.

Opponents of gays in the military applaud the back-burner treatment being accorded the issue and warn against any end-runs around the ban.

"The latest strategy of the opposition is to say that if they don't have the votes to change the law, they'll just ignore it. But that would be a breach of faith between the commander in chief and the troops he leads," said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness.

She concedes the world has changed since the ban was passed, but says "military culture hasn't changed." Men and women are separated in the services to ensure privacy and dignity, she said, and to try to integrate gays would "cause a lot of disruption."

Flag and General Officers for the Military, a nonprofit group of senior officers, has written a letter urging Congress to retain the ban, with at least 50 four-star generals and admirals expressing their concern about "the impact of repeal on morale, discipline, unit cohesion and overall military readiness."

[TotallyOz]

I watched Choi in interviews and was very impressed with him. I think he is a good representation for the fight of ending the policy. I give our service men more credit than their superiors do.