When will Barack Obama tap his inner Truman and take the initiative to end the ignominious ban on gays serving openly in the military?
Actually, he needs to exhibit only a fraction of Harry Truman's political courage. When FDR's successor announced in 1948 that he intended to racially integrate the armed forces, Americans recoiled in horror. Gallup reported that only 13 percent of the people endorsed the notion of blacks and whites serving together. Yet Truman signed the executive order anyway; as he liked to say, "I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt."
So begin Dick Polman, the National Political Columnist for the Philadelphia InquirerM in his column today, whose full title reads The American Debate: Obama needs just a bit of Truman's courage. I was planning to go to bed until I read the column. I decided I needed to write about it immediately.
The piece has a subtitle: Ending the ban on openly gay solders will be far simpler than was racially integrating the military. If you follow the link I provided above the fold, you will see a picture of former Lt. Dan Choi, whose case has become the focus of so much attention.
Polman provides a great deal of detail in one column, including the usual details about over 11,000 discharged since Don't Ask, Don't Tell became the law of the military, the numerous Arab linguists (including Choi) we have lost at a time when we have been engaged in two conflicts in which Arabic can be vital (remember, there are have been and still are Arab speaking fighters in the Afghan theater).
One paragraph in particular caught my attention:
At this point, America and Turkey are the sole founding members of NATO to maintain a ban on open service. Our closest ally, Great Britain, lifted its ban nine years ago, and has since determined that the policy switch, which it calls "a solid achievement," has had "no discernible impact" on recruitment or readiness. Nor has Israel reported problems, and, last I checked, those Israeli fighters are pretty tough.
Someone who would have agreed that one's sexual orientation should make no difference to service in the military was 1964 Republican Presidential nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater, who once said
You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.
I will return to Goldwater in a bit.
For all the crises that Obama may be facing, and thus be reluctant to take on the issue of open military service by gays, Polman provides all the material necessary to demolish that argument. Society was far more hostile to Blacks serving with Whites in 1948 than the American public is towards open gay service today. Former Joint Chiefs Chairman John Shalikashvili has given cover on the issue, whereas Truman faced an outright revolt by a largely Southern officer corps and open opposition by Omar Bradley. But let's focus on the problems before the President. Polman notes the following issues before Truman when he issued his executive order:
Soviet aggression and expansionism into much of what became the Eastern blog / Warsaw Pact
China about to fall to Mao
a severe housing crisis - remember, during WWII construction had not kept up, and now the baby boom was under way
A very hostile Republican Congress opposing all of his key iniatives
polling data that showed he had no chance of reelection that coming November
Truman acted. It took 6 years to fully accomplish, but as Polman notes Truman had the guts to make it happen.
Polman also references Goldwater:
And as another tough guy has said, "Lifting the ban on gays in the military isn't exactly nothing, but it's pretty darned close. Everybody knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar. . . . It's time to deal with this straight on and be done with it."
Last evening, shortly before 10, I posted this diary about Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times in which Rich talks about the 40 years since Stonewall, and in which he is critical of Obama's tentativeness towards gay rights. I chose to consider the issue more broadly, as one of basic human rights, and chose to use the words of Hillel to make my point about the timing of final ending inequality, If not now, when? I mention that because of the close of Polman's column, in the words the come immediately after the quote from Goldwater:
So said Barry Goldwater, father of the modern conservative movement, 16 years ago. But we'll never be done with it unless Obama starts the clock.
Perhaps Polman is being too harsh, you might say. The leadership we need on this, and on so many issues, ultimately must come from the President. Perhaps, you might say, Truman felt free to act because he didn't think he had much of a chance of getting reelected. That would IMHO badly misread the man from Independence, who relished a good battle, as he clearly demonstrated during the'48 campaign.
I do not doubt that Obama has political courage. He demonstrated it in his speech against the Iraq war in 2002, and we have on occasion seen similar courage from him while campaigning and since being elected. He is by nature less confrontational than was Truman.
Yet there are some things that require one to act. It is more than military necessity in this case, although clearly that is an issue.
Given how many NATO members allow openly gay people to serve in their military, unless we want to argue that NATO has been thereby weakened, it is hard to see how the arguments some make on this issue bear up.
And the longer we allow the atrocity of DADT to remain in place, the more good men like Dan Choi will see their willing service to this nation discredited.
One can go to Congressional Cemetery in our national capital and see a famous epitaph, on the grave of Leonard Matlovich:
On Don't Ask, Don't Tell, I think the words with which I closed my last diary, from Hillel, are also appropriate:
If not now, when?