SLDN Welcomes Launch of OutServe Publication for LGBT Military Personnel
The team at SLDN congratulates our friends and allies at OutServe on the release of the first issue of its magazine serving LGBT service members.
From OutServe’s Co-Director JD Smith:
“Our first objective with the magazine is to let all the gay, lesbian, bi, and trans members currently serving know that they are not alone. And we also want to communicate to all troops that there are capable gay military members serving honorably, and that accepting that and moving on will make our military stronger. Our goal is to have our next version available in print, at some of the larger military bases. Visibility is key. We are not about highlighting our differences, but demonstrating how LGBT troops are proud soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coasties, and Marines just like everyone else.”
Announcement of the magazine is already garnering significant coverage in the media. We send our best to the team at OutServe for a long and successful future in this groundbreaking endeavor.
To download the current issue, click here.
03-28-11 By Zeke Stokes, Communications Director |
2 Comments
Comments for this entry are closed.Michael@LeonardMatlovich.com on March 30, 2011 at 02.08 pm
A great idea poorly executed. Except for very brief passages, the passive, must-not-rock-the-boat content of the first issue could just as easily have been written by a paid “reporter” for the Pentagon tasked with making his/her bosses look good.
In addition to the absurd impression they, we hope, unintentionally leave that the explicit ban began in 1982 when it actually dates to 1941 and wrongly attributing the murder of sailor Allen Schindler as the origin of candidate Bill Clinton’s interest in ending that ban, WHERE is the actual ADVOCACY for OutServe’s members? WHERE is the call for the needless slow “implementation process” to be speeded up—as SLDN has recently admirably done?
The account of OutServe’s participation, along with SLDN and several other groups, in a meeting with the Pentagon Repeal Implementation Team [RIT] is even more disheartening as it contains no evidence that OutServe pushed back on the transparently antigay recommendations of the Pentagon Working Group Report that have resulted in a refusal of the DoD to include gay and lesbian service members under the crucial protections of the Military Equal Opportunity Program [MEO] or to extend to gay military couples even those partner benefits the DoD concedes are NOT banned by DOMA such as “military housing.”
In addition to apparently forgetting that the report specifically recommended AGAINST tracking antigay discrimination, evidenced by their implication that the fact that the Inspector General “currently does not have a plan to tabulate reports of such noncompliance or abuse “ is a some unrelated, independent choice, at the same time in describing that, nota bene, “OTHER stakeholders” brought up the MEO problem, the authors inexcusably parrot the report’s ridiculous and disingenuous assertion that “the whole point of the change in law was that we are all inherently equal, thus complaints should hold no special status.” Excuse me, Children, but if there’s a need for a MEO under which blacks, women, Asians, Latinos, members of various political parties, and all religions INCLUDING Wiccans…all acknowledged by the report as “protected classes”… can file discrimination complaints then where’s the sanity in your singing sickening stanzas of “Kumbaya” about the “DoD’s professionalism and earnest effort to get this
right, and take all legitimate concerns into account.” IF OUTSERVE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THE DoD IS INCULCATING POLICIES THAT WILL MAKE GAYS AND LESBIANS SECOND CLASS CITIZENS IN THE MILITARY—OR REFUSE TO PROTEST IT—THEN THEY HAVE NO BUSINESS PROMOTING THEMSELVES AS ADVOCATES FOR THEIR READERS!
The closest thing to suggesting “action” in the first issue is the final article, “We Are Change.” But in addition to amplifying the popular myth about Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen into “the pantheon of leading American civil rights heroes,” there is more simple cataloguing options for critical changes still needed than any aggressive attempt to create a movement to force those changes. The author should also be aware that while support from legislators for executive orders from President Obama for MEO-level protections against discrimination and equal partner benefits would be nice, they are neither legally or historically necessary as a supermajority in Congress is needed to overturn Executive Orders and only a couple ever have been.
Even were both houses still controlled by Democrats, the one person most needing pressure from “professional” gay service member advocates and the Community remains the President. But the most the author can manage to marshal is an embarrassingly meek, “Let’s continue to remind him and Congress of [his] pledge[s],” while totaling and inexplicably ignoring more than two-years of proof that he will do NOTHING for gays in uniform that the Pentagon doesn’t want him to, AND the fact that he is still inexcusably allowing his so-called Department of Justice to continue to fight the pro TOTAL and IMMEDIATE equality rulings in the Log Cabin Republican and Witt cases.
YES, one accepts that those behind OutServe mean well, but good intentions alone are NOT enough to reverse the determination of the DoD to create a kind of gay variation on the infamous “Jim Crow Army.” It took over 35 years of legal challenges to the ban to get us even this far. If all we had were the mindset of OutServe, it would take 35 more to become first class citizens for whom Freedom finally fully rings.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” - Abolitionist and onetime slave Frederick Douglass.
Bill on March 28, 2011 at 05.32 pm
Great new publication. I hope at least until DADT goes away, after its disgracefully slow process, SLDN can continue to alert all of us to upcoming issues.