As you may have read, the Department of Justice issued a brief recently for a DADT case in which they said gays are dangerous to cohesion because straight guys have to shower with them. They also used Colin Powell's arguments in support of DADT from 1993 to defend the law.
The gay community and the Palm Center, whose research was used in the brief, were outraged with the DOJ for its vicious attacks on gays. The Palm Center even bluntly said that the out of context usage of their research and quotes was "borderline unethical" and should not have happened. The DOJ had misconstrued some language from the research to make it seem like the Palm Center thought the privacy concerns of soldiers were a rational reason to uphold the law.
They claim to have meant no such thing.
In a deposition for the Log Cabin case, Frank offered testimony about the issue of privacy as it related to DADT. Frank, the author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, says his testimony was wildly mischaracterized by the DOJ in their brief.
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"What I said was that certainly some service members have privacy concerns," Frank says. "I'm not calling those privacy concerns irrational, what's irrational is using those concerns to exclude [out] gays in order to preserve cohesion." There is no evidence that privacy concerns adversely affect cohesion, Frank told the lawyer
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"We were very clear," Frank says. "They elided [the testimony]. I'm not sure if they did that on purpose or if they are generally confused about that. I mean, these are smart government lawyers who are assigned to know the ins and outs of this policy."
It seems to me like they were misusing the words of these researchers to lead to their own point. It's one thing to defend the law but, even to someone who's not a lawyer, this seems a little bit off to me. They strongly defended the DOMA policy beyond just those phrases, so why go through the trouble of adding in misleading bits?
Some have said it's not a big deal. They think that, relatively, it's not so bad when you look at the DOMA brief that was filed. This one seems to be less offensive and derogatory.
But beyond the fact that it rationalizes DADT and calls gays dangerous and all sorts of other things right when lawmakers are supposedly trying to reverse the policy that "works so well" according to the DOJ, there's this:
But Diane Mazur,co-legal director at the Palm Center, a think tank on sexual minorities in the military, found the brief extremely troubling on several levels, even calling it borderline unethical because it misrepresented the deposition of two Palm Center witnesses.
I'm not really willing to give the DOJ a pass on something that's personally offensive and probably unethical for them to have done. And on top of that, it's a brief that will probably help defend the DADT policy even more - even though it uses old and tired arguments. I know that they have to uphold the law as it is written but they don't have to do it so stridently.
And it seems that now the White House is starting to see that:
"I will say: was it odd that they included previous statements from General Colin Powell on a belief set that he no longer had? I don’t think the President would disagree with that," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said at a briefing for reporters on Tuesday.
It's even provoked such an outrage that for once the President himself has decided to say something:
"I want to add, we have a duty to uphold existing law, but I believe we must do so in a way that does not exacerbate old divides," Obama said at a reception with gay leaders later that month.
That was actually in reference to the DOMA brief. The White House, through Gibbs, has made all the statements on this brief. The point remains, Gibbs has been very quiet on DADT repeal and on gay issues lately. He's been evading questions on these issues, pointedly. It is nice to see them answer.
Maybe they'll get the message and do something. If not they're going to have a bunch of angry gays in November.