The Policy That Dares Not Speak

I am a constant critic of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" a failed policy that serves no purpose other than to stigmatize gays and further the Bible beaters' agenda of keeping LGBT Americans second class citizens. I have also mentioned Nathaniel Frank's book, “Unfriendly Fire,” before (Frank is pictured at left). Now the New York Times has a review of the book that also brings out just how insidious the policy is and how members of the military can have their careers more or less ruined based on rumor and innuendo. I have personally had clients who have never done anything improper yet they have been forced from the military not even knowing the identity of their accusers. The policy needs to go and needs to go now. If Obama the Democrat Congressional leadership had some guts and backbone, repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell would be a fast track agenda item. Here are some highlights from the Times review:

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The core message of Nathaniel Frank’s book about the American military’s ban on being openly gay can be summed up in a single slogan: “ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Don’t Work.” . . . to categorize him that way [as a dry professorial writer] would be using the type of specious reasoning on which, according to his book, American military policy about gay personnel is based.

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This is the same logic that allowed a Marine Corps corporal’s buying of Anne Rice novels to be used as admissible evidence of homosexuality at the man’s discharge investigation. And that example is real, not hypothetical. Mr. Frank didn’t have to make it up. Many Americans may not understand what the military’s 15-year-old “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” policy about gay personnel actually means. If sounds laissez-faire, it is anything but.

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[T]his expedient-sounding political compromise, sanctioned by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and then voted into law by Congress, has created legal means of terminating the careers of longtime and, Mr. Frank would argue, valuable members of our military. No explicitly sexual act is necessary to bring on accusations. The soldier who receives a warmly affectionate letter from a same-sex correspondent is in jeopardy of being booted out of the service.

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“Unfriendly Fire” offers a sharp, vigorously framed analysis of this state of affairs. Mr. Frank begins by assailing the assumption that a gay person in the military is someone who has chosen to break the military’s rules; that person, he says, violates the current code simply by existing.

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In the course of its intensive scrutiny of Senate hearings on the subject, the book finds similarities between that era’s rhetoric about homosexuality as a threat to unit cohesion and the same arguments, used four decades previously, to resist racial integration.

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“Unfriendly Fire” goes on to measure the gay ban’s cost and consequences. Mr. Frank does not do this casually; he is armed with budget, recruitment and expulsion statistics. Disturbing as they are to begin with, these figures become even more so when linked to the influx of ex-convicts and other problem recruits to replace those who have been dismissed. The single most alarming statement, in a book that bristles with them, is this one about the military’s moral waivers program to admit convicted felons: “Allowable offenses under the program include murder, kidnapping and ‘making terrorist threats.’ ”