There's a recommended diary up right now touting the perils of recruiting "foreigners" (Pentagon expanding number of foreigners recruited.) to do military jobs that could be performed by gays and lesbians barred from serving openly. The firing of gay Arabic linguists appears to make this move contradictory, but it's not. You see, if these "legal residents," quoting the AP on the recruiting goals, are gay, they'll be fired too.
First of all, the arbitrary dismissal of these linguists from important jobs and the fact that Defense is considering new measures to fill their positions shows that they were indispensable, and in fact, irreplaceable. Everyone has a right to pursue a profession suited to their skills, and no one deserves to be pushed out of their job because of prejudice. That so many jobs exist in our society where one person can be pushed out in such a fashion and another person shoved into their position shows that, in the military and across the employment spectrum, too many employers are more interested in excusing their prejudice of choice than seeing to jobs that need to be done.
Working people are not interchangeable cogs in a machine-- Don't Ask, Don't Tell is one of a whole host of employment policies that tries to turn us into statistics instead of people. The rule needs to be replaced with a comprehensive nondiscrimination policy, one that's fair to openly gay and lesbian people with whatever skills the military needs as well as people who do choose not to disclose their sexual orientations, transgender people, and-- here's the problem with the argument up in our fellow Kossack's diary-- people who have come here to do a job that suits them, regardless of their immigration status.
What on Earth is there to be gained by pitting gays and lesbians ousted from the military against "foreigners"? I realize the U.S. job market is tight right now, and employers across the board outsource everything they can. An important difference between the U.S. military, in most areas, and outsourced operations like Blackwater is that they have different standards; Private security firms recruit worldwide, sure, but more problematic is the fact that they recruit with far lower standards as to the discipline and disposition of their "contractors"--they're in the business of calls to violence instead of calls to service. We should be thinking about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as a discriminatory employment practice, one that's unfair and unjust, and it should be thrown out along with policies that discriminate against people for arbitrary reasons. The military has historically modeled less discriminatory employment practices over time, since Truman's executive order desegregating the armed forces. Military recruitment is actually a huge problem today, when it comes to over-recruiting the under-privileged. The many qualities that can be folded into this notion of "foreigners," from immigration status, current and prior nationality, to religious and racial background, are tricky matters to negotiate across our government. Absent fair visa policies and civil rights protections for non-citizens, there is no legitimate basis for a definition of "foreigner" that makes a universally intelligible and useful distinction between whatever foreigner is supposed to mean and whoever dismissed gay servicemembers (who, again, should never have been fired and deserve reinstatement) are. If we don't take into account that it's entirely possible that some of the people who have been dismissed because of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" might in fact be "foreigners," too, and if we don't embrace them on the same terms, we will never win anything meaningful.
Who becomes a linguist for the military? Why do we have a military? Why are the Arabic language and Arabic linguists and translators important to our current military prerogatives? Are our reasons for those things good reasons? How can we use military and the skills of people around the world to achieve peace? If we need a military and if that military needs skills that gays and/or "foreigners" possess, we need to think about the reasons. Illegal wars, wars of choice, and public images of our leaders landing on multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers to make us feel manly and heterosexual, are not enough. We should be fighting for the rights of gay, lesbian, bi, and trans servicemembers, including those who are serving with life histories that don't (yet) include U.S. citizenship. We should be fighting for a military that doesn't cost half our tax dollars. We should be fighting against a military that invades sovereign nations, transfers natural resources and assets to private corporations, and maintains arbitrary distinctions between gay and straight, "foreigner" and citizen, useful and undesirable.
Service takes many forms. Military service, student visas, work permits, and green cards are all roads to citizenship, but that's not all they are. We don't have to bar non-citizens from service in order to protect the rights of gays and lesbians. The policy of recruiting non-Americans to do translation work, or any work the military, is not going to end or forestall the process of repealing DADT unless we tackle it with a reductive, one-dimensional, us vs. them perspective.
It breaks my heart that we still need to have conversations like this, but when one group of legal residents is somehow sent to the back of the line in order to put another group of legal residents ahead of them, we're screwed. People who have been fired because of DADT deserve their jobs back, and people barred from serving openly deserve to do so, now and in the future. That includes the people who will be recruited . I'm confident that we'll repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the Obama adminstration, and if we don't, I'll be upset because it's a discriminatory policy. I won't just be upset, I'll be downright outraged whether we have "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or not, if the military is still in Iraq, Afghanistan, and if it's fundamentally still an institution that uses violence as an instrument of policy. But I'm not outraged about allowing qualified people, from whatever backgrounds, to work in whatever capacity they can, on fair terms.