Much of the opposition to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy has focused on American troops' readiness to accept openly gay comrades and its potential effect on overall morale. However, one Army colonel, speaking on condition of anonymity, has shed light on a larger concern: the color pink.
"You know, in our current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan," he commented to a reporter for the Daily Gay Times, "we've maintained that soldiers adhere to a pretty strict dress code that consists mainly of the desert camos you see."
"I've noticed that gays tend to wear light pink and other bright colors frequently," he remarked. "I'm not sure that the military is quite ready just yet to allow for those sorts of adjustment to our standard uniforms."
Bright colors were not his only concern. The colonel anticipates other issues in accommodating gay fashion style. "American soldiers aren't really known for looking too fabulous," he said, and that the militaries of Italy, France, and Brazil were "years" beyond the U.S. in that regard.
The colonel stressed that he was not personally opposed to gay rights and would support eventual repeal. "Tweaks to current policy," he said, just needed to be made, and he would be "willing to compromise." While cut-offs above the mid-thigh would certainly not be allowed, the colonel declared that military officials would consider allowing troops to wear capris.
The colonel also volunteered that he suspected some of his colleagues of being gay, and winked suggestively when Senator Scott Brown, a lieutenant colonel in the National Guard who has posed nude in Cosmopolitan, was mentioned.