Maybe homosexuals aren’t as bad for our military as some of our military leaders would have us believe.
Remember the big deal Pentagon leaders made a dozen years ago about how their world was going to end if they did not keep homosexuals out of their ranks? Well, as they say in Tony Soprano’s neighborhood, fuh-gedda-boudit.
The latest tally of homosexuals booted out of the military for being homosexuals shows a startling trend: After climbing for the past decade, homosexual-related discharges suddenly declined during the past two years, the years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by almost 40 percent.
So says the latest annual report on such discharges by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), a Washington-based advocacy group for homosexual military personnel.
Even Gen. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a defender of affirmative action for women and minorities, said lifting the homosexual ban would threaten “discipline, good order and morale.” Interestingly, military historians noted, that was the same language Gen. Dwight Eisenhower used in the 1940s to justify the Army’s racial segregation. Times do change. Some things do stay the same.
President Clinton and Congress compromised by cobbling together a policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Since 1994, it has prohibited military officials from asking homosexuals their status but also prohibited homosexuals from revealing their homosexual status.
Ten years later, in a startling display of the Law of Unintended Consequences, the policy intended to reduce homosexual-related discharges actually sharply increased the such ejections from the services, until the past two years.
The Pentagon expelled 617 service members for being homosexual in 1994. That number climbed steadily to an eye-popping 1,273 in 2001. Then came the “War on Terror,” as President Bush calls it, and homosexual-related discharges fell to 906 in 2002 and 787 in 2003.
Why the sharp decline? Has war brought a sudden wave of tolerance to our troops and their commanders? One wonders. There are no bigots in foxholes, according to an old time-tested nugget of combat wisdom. Judging by recent military personnel figures, there aren’t many “gay-bashers” in foxholes, either.
After Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ convention last week in Washington, a questioner asked whether the reported decline in homosexual discharges indicated the Pentagon was re-evaluating “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Mr. Rumsfeld said he had not seen the report and there were no plans to change the policy.
Maybe “Don’t ask, don’t tell” extends to Mr. Rumsfeld’s office, too: Nobody tells him about the status of homosexuals in his ranks — and he doesn’t ask. Still, Steve Ralls, SLDN spokesman, sounded encouraged when I reached him later. “That’s more than he’s said before,” Mr. Ralls said.
Until the Pentagon chiefs say otherwise, we are left to conclude the obvious, which is that the contributions made by homosexual men and lesbians in the military far outweigh any perceived problems, especially when there’s a war on.
Nor should we be surprised if homosexual-related discharges drop again this year, too. The Army, the largest of the services, has been stretched enough by its missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere to invoke its “stop-loss” authority, which prevents its soldiers from retiring or otherwise leaving when their service obligation ends.
Hard up for troops, a commander will think twice before sending a good soldier home just for being homosexual, like Col. Sherman T. Potter in “MASH” had bigger things to worry about than Cpl. Maxwell Klinger’s cocktail dress and pearls.
Discharges for simply being homosexual, without any other serious charges, have declined in every war since at least the Korean conflict, historians say. It is no surprise, then, to see a similar trend appear in this new era of wars against terrorism.
As the late libertarian-conservative standard-bearer Barry Goldwater, a retired Air Force general, editorialized in 1993, “You don’t need to be ’straight’ to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”
Many of today’s military brass undoubtedly agree. History may look back on this as the time when the commanders, in practice, silently rewrote the policy to something more workable: “Don’t ask, Don’t Tell — And Please Don’t Leave.”
Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.