Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, 229 to 186, to pass a defense bill approving more than $700 billion for military programs and containing an amendment overturning the 1993 law allowing gays to serve in the military only if they hide their sexual orientation. The legislation is now pending in the U.S. Senate. The 1993 law is the infamous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law." Unfortunately, the current proposal for repeal will go into effect only after the $5 million Pentagon study is received on December 1 and after the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify that the repeal. What if the study recommends against repeal?
What's to study anyway? Consider there are about 30 countries in the world, including nearly all of the NATO members, as well as South Africa, Brazil, and the Philippines that allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military. And on May 16, 2010, representatives from Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the Netherlands met at the Brookings Institute to discuss how the militaries in those countries handled allowing gays and lesbians to serve in their militaries. The consensus was that, in spite of concerns before the change, when gays and lesbians were allowed to serve, it was a non-issue.
In 2000, Aaron Belkin, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert, a veteran of the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, and Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, co-authored an exhaustive 44-page study on Canada, which, after a series of lawsuits in 1991, changed its policies to allow gays to openly serve in the military. The study, which at the time was regarded as the most comprehensive academic study of homosexuality in a foreign military ever completed, concluded that the change in policy had "not led to any change in military performance, unit cohesion, or discipline."
And the American public support repeal as shown by a recent poll showed that 75 percent of Americans support openly gay people serving in the U.S. military.
The Obama administration is in an awkward position by supporting the repeal legislation on the one hand and defending the Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law in at least three lawsuits. The Supreme Court has not addressed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law since its decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down that state's sodomy laws. The Court held Americans have a fundamental right to privacy and this includes the right of gay and lesbian Americans to engage in intimate relationships without government interference. The plaintiffs in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States argue that the law violates this fundamental right. One of the plaintiffs in Log Cabin is an intelligence officer discharged under the law and another is a John Doe, a gay soldier currently serving in the military.
The second case is Cook v. Gates, the plaintiffs are twelve service members who were kicked out of the military because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Last month, the First Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on a motion to reverse a lower court ruling dismissing plaintiff's Don't Ask, Don't Tell challenge.
The third case is Witt v. United States Department of the Air Force where the plaintiff is 18 year Air Force veteran Margaret Witt, a highly decorated nurse, who also filed suit challenging the law after she was discharged for being in a relationship with another woman. A District Court judge dismissed the challenge, but the case is currently being appealed.
Repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" now. It is the right thing to do.