With Adm. Mullen's statement today that he sees "little resistance" to a repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the military, it's not hard to see the end of this ridiculous and discriminatory policy in America's armed forces.
But it's not hard to project from this point to a similar end to other discriminatory policies against gays and lesbians in America -- including and especially laws prohibiting gay marriage.
More at the jump.
I'm sure others here have noted this, and by no means do I think a repeal of DADT, let alone national marriage rights for gays and lesbians, are a sure thing -- but still, it's hard not to feel hopeful when considering history.
I remember when DADT was instituted, you got the feeling that Sen. Nunn and others had rarely even said the word "homosexual" in public, let alone discussed the role same-sex relationships play in the lives of gays and lesbians. If you don't understand gays and lesbians, or consider them fundamentally different in personality from heterosexuals, you won't be able to place those relationships in the same context of as heterosexual relationships.
In that end, it wasn't surprising that they would pathetically think gays being open about their sexuality would be too scary and difficult for our well-trained, fearless and disciplined soldiers to handle.
Around that time, a columnist at the Philadelphia Gay News that I worked with commented that he believed the anti-gay rhetoric in the DADT debate, as well as the larger national discussion of gays, was good for gay rights in the long run. From the twisted logic of Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, to the crude jokes of Howard Stern or Andrew Dice Clay -- their obsession with the immorality or strangeness of gays would ultimately defeat that view. His reasoning was that every time the word "gay" was used in public discourse, it was normalized, taken out of the shadows. Every time homosexuality was discussed, even negatively, homosexuality was considered. That consideration robbed the fear-mongering or slurs their power, because for that to work, gays or lesbians have to be as alien as possible.
I didn't agree at the time, but I find it hard to disagree now. It was barely 40 years ago that being in a gay bar was an arrestable offense around the country -- even (and famously) in New York City. At that time, Time Magazine and others in the media still referred to gays as "deviants." It's barely been 30 years since the medical community stopped treating same-sex attraction as a mental illness. It's been barely 25 years since the President of the United States was incapable of mentioning the AIDS Epidemic as it ravaged communities across this country -- because it was viewed as a "gay" disease.
And it's been barely 20 years since the U.S. Military even acknowledged gays as capable of being able to serve the country -- and at least (the very least) permitted gays to continue to serve (at the cost of openness and honesty.) Since then we've seen sodomy laws finally fall, gay politicians openly serving the country and gay couples getting the legal rights and privileges afforded straight couples. Not everywhere, hardly anywhere in fact, but it's happening.
And the world still spins.
Normalcy. Demystification. A recent poll showed that folks in Iowa didn't even rate repealing that state's allowing of gay marriage because, well, it's no big deal. And if it is no big deal in Iowa...
Normalcy is typically segregation's Kryptonite. And military service has historically been one of the best ways to make normalcy happen. A similar situation happened in America with civil rights for African Americans. The idea of segregation of blacks was permissible because blacks were seen by whites as a dangerous "other." Segregation was required to keep other rights from African-Americans because it kept them misunderstood, or ignored completely. Unjust "Sundown Laws" in many towns and cities outside of the south kept Blacks from taking residence there at all, and served to keep Civil Rights out of public consciousness.
Many scholars believe that it took American blacks and whites (and other racial groups) serving together in World War 2 to bring about the beginning of the end of America's Apartheid. At first, black units in WW2 were separated by race, but as early as the Pearl Harbor attack, and later with the Tuskagee Airmen, it was hard for even the most racist Americans to deny the sacrifice of African-Americans in the war.
Most powerfully, however, was how when these soldiers came home, they were not inclined to allow the injustice to continue. If they were American enough to die for the country, they should be American enough to sit wherever they'd like on a bus.
That was not the only engine to the Civil Rights movement, nor is this simplistic overview a full picture of how military service affects rights movements.
But it's fairly easy to imagine that in a military that no longer denies the rights of Gay Americans to serve, those same service men and women will be less inclined to settle for "civil unions" or less when their heterosexual comrades-in-arms are allowed to marry their sweethearts back home.
Many of the arguments against Gay Marriage center on the idea of a "slippery slope" that equates gay marriage with everything from pedophilia to bestiality. This is only possible by painting a picture of gays as sexual monsters without morals or control. That simply becomes less and less doable if that view of gay is undermined by what most Americans accept as the morality and emotional discipline of military service. DADT was able to obscure that by making gay men and women who served lie... once it is lifted, the lie is gone, and normalcy creeps in.
And just as the argument that 'one who fights for the rights of Americans should be afforded those same rights' was a powerful one during the Civil Rights Movement, it will be no less powerful during a future "Prop 8"-like campaign. Patriotism can be a powerful antidote to bigotry.
Of course, that's not to say the most vehement anti-gay forces will stop, or that they won't win battles. But at the end of the day, I really believe the more they talk about gay marriage, the more gays are able to live openly and without shame, and the longer gay marriages stay in states without those states somehow collapsing in some sort of hedonistic apocalypse, the war will be won for equality.
Very few things can grow while hidden.