SLDN MAC Members Respond to ROA Letter
This morning SLDN Military Advisory Council (MAC) and Reserve Officers Association (ROA) members including Brigadier General Keith Kerr CSMR (Ret.), Major General Dennis J. Laich USAR (Ret.), and Colonel Thomas Field USAR (Ret.) delivered the following letter to Congressional leaders. The letter responds to Friday’s letter from the ROA.
On Tuesday SLDN issued a national action alert asking supporters to urge key Senators and Representatives to vote for DADT repeal this week as we approach the markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011. Now is the time for advocates of open service to keep up the pressure as we near historic votes in the House and Senate that could come as soon as Thursday.
TEXT OF RESPONSE LETTER
SLDN Military Advisory Council
P.O. Box 65301, Washington, D.C. 20035
202-328-3244
May 26, 2010
The Honorable Ike Skelton, Chairman
House Armed Services Committee
2206 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515-6035
The Honorable Howard P. McKeon
Ranking Member
House Armed Services Committee
2184 Rayburn House Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20515-6035
Dear Chairman Skelton and Ranking Member McKeon,
The undersigned write to you as members of the Reserve Officers Association of the United States (ROA) and of the Military Advisory Council of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN).
As you know, ROA was chartered by Congress in 1950 to promote national security. We are proud to support its mission.
SLDN was organized in 1993 to lift the ban preventing gays, lesbians and bisexuals from serving openly and honestly in the military. About 66,000 gay and lesbian soldiers are currently serving, in silence, in the armed forces of the United States. For many, their lives are at risk every day in defense of freedoms they do not fully share.
In February 2010, at its annual General Assembly, the ROA thoroughly debated the Congressionally-mandated Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, both in committee and on the floor. The result, after caucuses by each ROA state department, was a two-to-one vote against endorsement of DADT.
We agree with Major General David R. Bockel, USAR (Retired) and Rear Admiral Paul T. Kayye, USN (Retired) who recently wrote to you on ROA letterhead, that the “support of our military leadership” for repeal of DADT “is vital”. But we wish to make it clear that the officer membership of the ROA has already spoken, by a two-thirds majority, against endorsing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Instead, ROA has adopted a position of complete neutrality.
Dennis J. Laich
Major General, USAR (Retired)
Keith Kerr
Brigadier General, CSMR (Retired)
Thomas F. Field
Colonel, USAR (Retired)
cc: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner
05-26-10 By Paul DeMiglio, Senior Communications Manager |
2 Comments
Comments for this entry are closed.Bill on May 30, 2010 at 01.48 pm
Sadly, I’m afraid any letter to Reps. Skelton and McKeon amounts to spitting into the wind, but we have to try. I watched almost all the House discussion of the Authorization Act on C-Span last Thursday May 27, 2020. Rep. McKeon was the primary adversary to ending DADT, and his pronouncements were repetitious, deceptive, incomplete and perhaps even ignorant. Maybe I missed it, but as he repeatedly referenced recent Skelton/Gates-Millen correspondence, he ignored the work that went into the carefully crafted wording of the final amendment that was under debate. He also did not accept in any way the compromise that gives DOD and the Joint Chiefs veto power over the President for final implementation of the end of DADT. McKeon and other opponents also did not credit the experience of over two dozen allied democratic countries where ending their versions of DADT has routinely been a “non-event.” At least he did not evoke theocratic reasons to keep DADT in our military—which routinely ignores heterosexual sexual activity outside of marriage and even most heterosexual sexual harassment. Reading between the lines, however, it was clear that McKeon and his intolerant peers continue to expect a subversion of the Pentagon Working Group’s mission from an evaluation of “how” to “whether” to end DADT. McKeon and those he represents clearly will use all political means possible to never end DADT. They are on the wrong side of American opinion, common sense, and military reality, justice and history.
Something else I wondered about: it seems Congressional opponents of ending DADT had last moment private correspondence with some of the service secretaries and joint chiefs—private in that they were not respecting executive and military chains of command as they searched for bias against setting a final path this year for an end to DADT. I’m not sure what the rules are, but I can’t help but wonder to what degree the President really knows in his bones that he is Commander-in-Chief.
Scott on May 26, 2010 at 09.31 pm
The two retired officers claimed that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) is divisive when polls indicate nearly 80% of Americans support repealing DADT. It would seem that the two retired officers’ argument rests on…their own opinions, not facts.
That the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the British Armed Forces are both considered good enough by our military to be deemed allies-in-arms, and the latter good enough to be considered worthy to fight, bleed, and die alongside US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (places the British fought and died generations before the American military fought there—search old clippings of Victorian era newspapers for the work “jihad” and you will find it) these same allies are somehow magically deemed unworthy of respect and their own commonsensical approach to allowing worthy soldiers to fight regardless of sexual orientation is somehow magically deemed worthless. They are our allies but, apparently, we couldn’t possibly learn anything from them. Fine. Then let’s tell them to head home. Who needs allies in Iraq and Afghanistan anyway?
The US military has essentially fired upwards of 14,000 soldiers since DADT was started, and fired them based on something that in the military context is admittedly not irrelevant but to the professional soldier is certainly not important: the happenstance of sexual orientation. My God, even frontline, combat decorated officers who valiantly defend the republic are being fired; highly- (and expensively-) trained specialist personnel are also being fired, and a wasteful witch-hunting apparatus within the military to find cause to dismiss gay soldiers remains in place, costing the taxpayer millions of dollars so that tax-funded military assets—i.e., good soldiers—can be hunted down and run out of the services in the name of…what exactly?
Unit cohesion?
Increasingly, I find that term to be not reasonable, but disingenuous—almost as if it is a codeword. DADT is no agent of cohesion. It is an agent of abject, pernicious purgation. “Unit cohesion” is increasingly resonating like the echoes of “purity”—racial or ethnic—especially given the many soldiers who have come to light as having been solid, dependable, experienced warriors who were idiotically dismissed under DADT, sometimes only after their own superior officers attempted bureaucratic tricks and machinations to attempt to keep them in the military—because they were Good Soldiers.
DADT is targeted betrayal by the military against its own soldiers. It is as if the likes of former Sen. Sam Nunn and the other architects of DADT correctly recognized that gay Americans have always been in the ranks; but, then decided in the name of purity in the ranks that DADT would be the solution for getting rid of them—getting rid of those soldiers deemed “undesirable” according to the architects’ own prejudiced, stereotype-ridden understanding of what “the gays” were like. After all, all gay people are….what? What? Just what is the problem? They’re incapable of being soldiers? Yes, much the same way that all black people like fried chicken and all Jews are covetous Christ-haters.
Ultimately, the logic is the same.
Remember that Sen. Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, was DADT’s chief architect, and that DADT was voted for by the likes of Joe Biden and John Kerry. The enemy of the American solider who happens to be gay and of the American citizen—80% of us anyway—who want to be defended by good troops, period, is simple bigotry and political cowardice. Democrats can give into those two vicious creatures as readily as Republicans—it all depends on the political climate.
We’re about to see who is a bigot and political coward and who is not.