Latest News
Waco Tribune: Rowland Nethaway - Do tell; ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ redo
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promises to remove barriers preventing homosexual men and women from serving in the armed forces.
Paving the way for this change, the House Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee held a recent hearing on the military’s controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” law that allows gay men and lesbians to serve if they keep their sexual orientations private.
The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy discourages the military from asking service members about sexual orientation even though overt homosexual behavior remains grounds for removal from the military.
If elected, perhaps Obama will have more success than Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton who made the same promise to voters in 1992.
Clinton repeated his promise only days before he took office. No doubt Clinton fully intended to keep his promise to overturn the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military.
For a man who governed with one eye on the polls, Clinton completely misread public opposition to ending the long-standing ban against homosexuals in the military.
Clinton hit from all sides
Besides strong opposition from within the military, Clinton also was hit with opposition from religious groups and even members of his own party. The opposition from religious groups came not only from fundamentalists, but also from many mainstream churchgoers.
Rather than use his authority as commander in chief to push through a new policy to lift the ban on homosexuals serving in the military, Clinton asked his secretary of defense, Les Aspin, to come up with a compromise policy.
That compromise, approved by Clinton, became the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that the former president now condemns as a failure without recognizing his own paternal responsibility.
At the recent House subcommittee hearing, lawmakers heard from witnesses on both sides of a proposed new law to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Several witnesses testified that the current law hurts the military by denying the military the skills that could be provided by gays and lesbians.
Others testified that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would hurt military recruitment and retention. Others argued that unit cohesion would be hurt if gays and lesbians were allowed to serve openly.
These same arguments were made a decade ago before the adoption of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, a black man who served in the Army before it was desegregated in 1948 by President Harry Truman’s executive order, testified that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is similar to the military’s old racial segregation policy.
There are parallels, but a significant difference is that many, if not most, religions — both Christian and Muslim — continue to teach that homosexuality is a sin and refuse to allow homosexuals to conduct services or serve as members of the clergy.
Nevertheless, public opinion is shifting on this issue.
John Shalikashvili, the retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the current “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was adopted, now believes that allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military “would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces.”
Shalikashvili thinks the military can succeed where the churches have failed. He based his opinion in part on a 2007 Zogby poll that reported 75 percent of the troops interviewed who served in Iraq and Afghanistan said they were comfortable around gay men and lesbians and do not believe morale would be hurt.
For his part, Republican presidential candidate John McCain wants to preserve the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
In the final analysis, the American voters will decide and the military will salute and follow orders.
