The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is not yet scheduled for a vote this year in Congress, but Admiral Mike Mullen’s poignant and personal urging to dispose of it should mark the beginning of its end.
In the shower of highly important national and international new stories this past week (i.e. Obama’s ‘let’s get real’ confrontation with Republicans, Haiti, Toyota’s recalls, angry Chinese, Jon Stewart dueling with Bill O’Reilly) there was one moment that, many of us hope, will stand as a historic turning point.
It was the appearance, this past Tuesday, of Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mullen was there to testify against the 16-year-old policy, known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which only allows gay men and women to serve in the military so long as they keep their sexual orientation a secret. The policy, in its own terms, emits an odor of bigotry and, according the the New York Times, has led to more than 13,000 discharges to date.
The expulsions are sad affronts to human dignity, and it’s clear that many of them–notably the purging of dozens of badly-needed Arabic translators found to be gay–undermine the very objective (national defense) that the armed forces are there to secure.
The self-denying affront of the policy matches the unusual cruelty of the politics behind it. Bill Clinton, in his run for President in 1992 said he would lift the ban on gay people serving in the military, only to encounter such stiff political resistance that he chose to back down and accept the Congressionally imposed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as a compromise. As did Clinton before him, candidate Obama raised hopes that he would move to end discrimination against gays in the military, only to table the issue so as to save his political capital for health care reform and the emergencies of wars and a sinking economy.
A remarkable development, in the meantime, is how swiftly public opinion has been changing. Whereas polls showed that most people opposed gays serving openly in the military when Clinton came to office, recent polls show that roughly three in four Americans support gays serving in the military without having to hide their sexual orientation.
The strong shift in public opinion at least shows that the days left in this needless controversy are inexorably counting down. Still, it was inspiring to see and hear Admiral Mullen on Tuesday, not just mouthing support for ending the policy but adding a poignant and dramatic personal appeal: “No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”
Amen.
–Tim Connor