COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Gays/Lesbians
Gay Groups Renew Drive Against ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
LIZETTE ALVAREZ, New York Times
September 14, 2006
MADISON,
Wis. —The three young men who tried to enlist at an Army
recruiting station here appeared to be first-rate military material.
Two were college students, and the other was a college graduate. They
had no criminal records. They were fit and eager to serve at a time
when wars on two fronts have put a strain on American troops and the
need for qualified recruits is great.
But the recruiter was forced to turn them away, for one reason: they are gay and unwilling to conceal it.
“Don’t judge me because of my sexuality,” said one of
the three, Justin Hager, 20, a self-described Republican from a
military family who has “a driving desire to join” the
armed forces. “Judge me because of my character and drive.”
As the Pentagon’s search for soldiers grows more urgent, gay
rights groups are making the biggest push in nearly a decade to win
repeal of a compromise policy, encoded in a 1993 law and dubbed
“don’t ask, don’t tell,” that bars openly gay
people from serving in the military.
The policy, grounded in a belief that open homosexuality is damaging to
unit morale and cohesion, stipulates that gay men and lesbians must
serve in silence and refrain from homosexual activity, and that
recruiters and commanders may not ask them about their sexual
orientation in the absence of compelling evidence that homosexual acts
have occurred.
The push for repeal follows years of legal setbacks, as well as discord
among gay rights groups about how, or even whether, to address the
issue. Now, rather than rely on the courts, advocates are focusing on
drumming up support in towns across the nation, spotlighting the
personal stories of gay former service members and pushing a Democratic
bill in the House that would do away with the policy.
In August the gay rights group Soulforce opened a national campaign by
recruiting openly gay people, including the three young men in Madison,
who would have enlisted in the military if not for “don’t
ask, don’t tell.” [As part of that campaign, two young
people who were rejected as applicants on Tuesday at a recruitment
center in Chicago returned there on Wednesday and engaged in a sit-in.
They were arrested but later released without charges.]
The move to change the policy faces stiff resistance from the Pentagon
and Republicans in Congress, who, in a time of war during a tough
election year, have no longing for another contentious debate about gay
troops. The House bill, introduced last year by Representative Martin
T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, has picked up 119 supporters, but
only five of them Republicans.
“In the near term, it has zero chance,” said Daniel
Gouré, a vice president at the centrist Lexington Institute.
“It’s hard to see how anyone would want to give potential
opponents any ammunition to knock them off.”
A 2004 report by the Urban Institute concluded that at least 60,000 gay
people were serving in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the
National Guard. But since 1993, at least 11,000 members have been
discharged for being openly gay, among them 800 in highly crucial jobs,
according to the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s
investigative arm.
For all of that, gay rights groups, gay veterans and some analysts say
much has changed since the policy was adopted. A Gallup poll in 2004
found that 63 percent of respondents favored allowing gay troops to
serve openly, and a similar survey, by the Pew Research Center this
year, put the number at 60 percent; those majorities did not exist in
1993. Young people in particular now have more tolerant views about
homosexuality.
In addition, 24 foreign armies, most notably those of Britain and
Israel, have integrated openly gay people into their ranks with little
impact on effectiveness and recruitment. In Britain, where the military
was initially forced to accept gay troops by the European Court of
Human Rights, gay partners are now afforded full benefits, and the
Royal Navy has called on a gay rights group to help recruit gay sailors.
The new debate on “don’t ask, don’t tell” also
coincides with multiple deployments that are being required of many
American troops by a military that has lowered its standards to allow
more high school dropouts and some convicted criminals to enlist.
“Would you rather have a felon than a gay soldier?” said
Capt. Scott Stanford, a heterosexual National Guard commander of a
headquarters company who returned from Iraq in June. “I
wouldn’t.”
Lt. Gen. Daniel W. Christman, retired, former superintendent at West
Point and onetime assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said both the British experience and the shifts in attitudes at
home would cause the American armed forces to change, though slowly.
“It is clear that national attitudes toward this issue have
evolved considerably in the last decade,” said General Christman,
now a senior vice president at the United States Chamber of Commerce.
“This has been led by a new generation of service members who
take a more relaxed and tolerant view toward homosexuality.”
In fact, a growing number of gay service members have told advocacy
groups that fewer heterosexual troops are making homosexuality an
issue. In some cases, they say, commanders look the other way when
someone is suspected of being gay or even avows it, especially if that
service member is valuable. Since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001,
discharges of openly gay members have fallen by 40 percent.
“People are really blasé about the issue,” said Tim
Smith, 24, a former marine who was discharged last year after a
civilian chaplain, told of Mr. Smith’s homosexuality by
congregants, alerted his commander.
Mr. Smith, who was married when he entered the Marine Corps in 2001,
hopes to dispel a stereotype of the “promiscuous, night-going,
street-dancing” gay man by telling his story and sharing the
reaction that disclosure of his orientation elicited. That reaction was
largely favorable. At the end, he said, his commander even told the
commanding general in a letter that Mr. Smith would be impossible to
replace.
On the other side of the divide, Elaine Donnelly, president of the
conservative Center for Military Readiness, said permitting gay men and
lesbians to serve openly would prompt recruitment rates to drop and
disrupt unit cohesion, a linchpin in the decision to allow gay troops
to serve only in silence.
“People in the military live in conditions of little or no
privacy,” said Ms. Donnelly, who advocates a full ban on gay
troops. “In conditions of forced intimacy, people should not have
to expose themselves to other persons who are sexually attracted to
them.”
Further, the policy lets unhappy troops, straight or gay, ditch the
military service to which they have committed. About 85 percent of
those discharged under the policy had declared a homosexual
orientation, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a
gay rights watchdog; roughly half that number had volunteered the
information simply to get out of the military.
“It lets people kind of get out of jail free,” said Aaron
Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in
the Military, a research group at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, that has sided with the effort to eliminate “don’t
ask, don’t tell.”
Mr. Hager, the young man rejected at the recruiting center here in
August along with John Alaniz, 25, and Derek House, 19, had expected
that outcome. Joining the Soulforce campaign, he said, was about making
a point.
He had tried to enlist in the Navy in high school, when his sexual
orientation was still hidden, and had scored high in his aptitude test.
His father had served in Vietnam, and his grandfather, a concentration
camp survivor, had instilled in him a drive to safeguard America. But a
broken ankle dashed his plans then.
This time it was his own words that sidelined him.
“I am openly homosexual,” he said, “and that opportunity won’t be there for me.”
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