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NYT: Nathaniel Frank Responding to Gen. McPeak

New York Times
Opinion
Letters

The Battle Over ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

Re “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change” (Op-Ed, March 5):

Gen. Merrill A. McPeak tries to shift the focus of the gay troops debate to its weaker talking points, while ignoring the wealth of actual evidence about openly gay service. Shockingly, he claims that others have “avoided a discussion of unit cohesion,” while he himself fails to address a single one of the dozens of studies that show no link between openly gay service and impaired cohesion.

“I believe repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will weaken the warrior culture,” he writes, offering no greater basis for this belief than the fact that 17 years ago he and other military brass “concluded that allowing open homosexuality in the ranks would probably damage the cohesiveness of our combat units.”

Yet as an article published by the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concludes, “there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly.” And the best evidence that openly gay service works is that a majority of troops say they already believe there are gays in their units.

This is not about unit cohesion, but about the personal intolerance of a generation of military officers who refuse to accept that the world has changed, and so has their beloved institution.

Nathaniel Frank
Brooklyn, March 5, 2010

The writer is a senior research fellow with the Palm Center, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America.”

Click here to read the original article.