So we're back to discussing the military's Don't Ask/ Don't Tell policy, which allows lesbians and gay men to serve in the military so long as they remain silent about their sexual orientation. Early on, a federal judge who struck the policy down as lacking any rational basis pointed out the facial absurdity built in to DADT -- the pretense seems to be that some recruits do not know that the military harbors lesbians and gay men, so in order to preserve their ignorance, we adopt a policy announcing the presence of lesbians and gay men in the military and ordering them to remain silent about it.
But the greatest absurdity of DADT is military officers whose job it is to focus 19 year old males on learning tasks that could include deliberately imperiling their own lives telling us that they just can't train the boys to get over the presence of openly lesbian/gay service members. Just as military leaders asserted during the 1940s that no white soldier would ever take orders from a black officer. After Truman's 1948 order desegregating, the Army continued to field segregated units during the Korean War and found that all-black units tended to perform badly. Those same black soldiers performed just fine in integrated units, however, thereby proving the point that people will often live up to, or down to, the expectations that authority figures set for them. And, of course, some 40 years later, all U.S. soldiers took orders from a black officer while Colin Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.