Obama to End Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Barack Obama said during the campaign that he does not support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  Now, his spokesman is promising that Obama will end the policy.  It’s an overdue move.  DADT was ill-advised even in the 1990s and honestly is something I’ve never forgiven Sam Nunn for. 

From the linked article:

President Obama will end the 15-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that has prevented homosexual and bisexual men and women from serving openly within the U.S. military, a spokesman for the president-elect said.

Obama said during the campaign that he opposed the policy, but since his election in November he has made statements that have been interpreted as backpedaling. On Friday, however, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, responding on the transition team’s Web site to a Michigan resident who asked if the new administration planned to get rid of the policy, said:

“You don’t hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it’s ‘Yes.’ “

Gibbs is right — it’s not often that we hear bluntness from a politician.  It’s refreshing.

An ABC poll in July found that three-quarters of Americans supported allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military compared to 44 percent of Americans who expressed the same support in 1993, when President Bill Clinton approved “don’t ask, don’t tell” as what he called an “honorable compromise” that nevertheless bitterly disappointed his supporters in the gay community.

Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., both of whom backed the 1993 policy, recently called for it to be re-evaluated. John Shalikashvili, who followed Powell as chairman, has called for its repeal, as has former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr, an opponent of gay rights and legal protections for gays. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Barr disparaged the policy as wasting money and talent.

Attitudes are changing about gay people in general; it’s logical that attitudes about gays serving openly in the military would change as well.  Attitudes are also changing about gay marriage, although that’s moving a bit more slowly.

Recently, the main active support for “don’t ask, don’t tell” has come from the nonprofit Center for Military Readiness, whose founder, Elaine Donnelly, and other officers did not respond to requests for comment.

Donnelly has argued that ending the ban on gays serving openly in the military would devastate unit cohesion and morale by ordering heterosexual troops into “forced cohabitation” with openly gay and lesbian troops. But critics of the policy say society has changed since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was implemented to address similar concerns.

I’ve talked about Elaine Donnelly before.  Her arguments amount to little more than bigotry and the same anti-gay meme that’s getting to be so tiresome.  She does not have an intellectually-honest argument, so she’s constructed the same old fear argument.  Hmm — that sounds a lot like the arguments that people who are against same-sex marriage use.

More recent years have seen high-profile discharges of gay Arabic linguists and other troops whose military jobs were deemed essential in Iraq, Afghanistan and the “war on terror” – dismissals that struck many people as inexplicable, said sociologist Melissa Embser-Herbert, author of “The U.S. Military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy: A Reference Handbook.”

“We know of gay, lesbian, bisexual veterans who have served in combat theater, and I think that’s also a big piece of it,” she said. “It’s a much harder sell to the general public that that person who died or lost a leg didn’t deserve to be serving their country.”

It is idiotic and self-defeating to have people we need in the military — such as Arabic linguists — being discharged because they’re gay.  We need those people.  They’re critical to the mission.  But that’s what the military did, even as it was fighting a war in Arabic-speaking Iraq.  When I was in the service we talked about military logic being backward; this certainly is an example of it.

We have an all-volunteer military.  That depends on the stream of recruits in an era when many can make more money in the private sector — without people shooting at them.  If we have people who want to serve, we need to welcome them, train them, and invest in their success. 

It’s past time for DADT to be repealed.    I hope legislation is passed within Obama’s first 100 days.  It’s vital to our long-term national security.