Posts tagged Don't Ask Don't Tell

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Defense Sec­re­tary Robert Gates wants the repeal of DADT to be rushed through the lame duck ses­sion and not left for the new leg­is­la­ture, where Repub­li­cans will of course block repeal. Obvi­ously, Sec­re­tary Gates feels this is an issue of national secu­rity and mil­i­tary readi­ness. He has been some­what equiv­o­cal in the past; this is his strongest stance to date, and really quite extraordinary.

Some back­ground: Of the 26 coun­tries that par­tic­i­pate mil­i­tar­ily in NATO, 22 per­mit gay peo­ple to serve. Of the 5 per­ma­nent mem­bers of the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil, three (Britain, France, and Rus­sia) per­mit gay peo­ple to serve openly and two (China and the United States) do not.

Here are the coun­tries with whom the US shares the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of still deny­ing its gay cit­i­zens the right to openly serve in the mil­i­tary: Antigua, Bangladesh, Bar­ba­dos, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Brunei, Cameroon, Cuba, Cyprus, China, Domini­can, Egypt, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guyana, Iran, Kiri­bati, Jamaica, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Mal­dives, Mozam­bique, Namibia, Nauru, Nige­ria, North Korea, Pak­istan, Papua New Guinea and Saudi Arabia.

Canada lifted its ban on gays in the mil­i­tary in in 1992, and thus has had a fully inclu­sive mil­i­tary for almost 20 years. An exten­sive study of Canada’s inte­grated mil­i­tary was done in 2000 by Aaron Belkin and Jason McNi­chol. Belkin is Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Study of Sex­ual Minori­ties in the Mil­i­tary at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Santa Bar­bara. McNi­chol is Doc­toral Can­di­date in Soci­ol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley and Direc­tor of ELM Research Asso­ciates, a non-​​partisan research firm in Berkeley.

Key find­ings are as follows:

• Lift­ing of restric­tions on gay and les­bian ser­vice in the Cana­dian Forces has not led to any change in mil­i­tary per­for­mance, unit cohe­sion, or discipline.
• Self-​​identified gay, les­bian, and trans­sex­ual mem­bers of the Cana­dian Forces con­tacted for the study describe good work­ing rela­tion­ships with peers.
• The per­cent of mil­i­tary women who expe­ri­enced sex­ual harass­ment dropped 46% after the ban was lifted. While there were sev­eral rea­sons why harass­ment declined, one fac­tor was that after the ban was lifted women were free to report assaults with­out fear that they would be accused of being a lesbian.
• Before Canada lifted its gay ban, a 1985 sur­vey of 6,500 male sol­diers found that 62% said that they would refuse to share show­ers, undress or sleep in the same room as a gay sol­dier. After the ban was lifted, follow-​​up stud­ies found no increase in dis­ci­pli­nary, per­for­mance, recruit­ment, sex­ual mis­con­duct, or res­ig­na­tion problems.
• None of the 905 assault cases in the Cana­dian Forces from Novem­ber, 1992 (when the ban was lifted) until August, 1995 involved gay bash­ing or could be attrib­uted to the sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion of one of the parties.
• The Amer­i­can pub­lic is also in favor of lift­ing the ban. In the most recent Gallup sur­vey of Amer­i­can atti­tudes toward gays in the mil­i­tary, pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber of this year, every demo­graphic broadly sup­ports gays serv­ing openly. Among 18-​​year-​​olds to 29-​​year-​​olds — who make up the vast major­ity of the mil­i­tary force — sup­port for over­turn­ing the cur­rent pol­icy is at 79 percent.

And yet the ban remains…for no other rea­son than that a large seg­ment of the Repub­li­can base remains solidly, viciously homo­pho­bic. How long will the opin­ions of this minor­ity be allowed to dam­age the rep­u­ta­tion of a great nation on the world stage?

Prob­a­bly for quite a while. At least two more years, it seems.