The Pentagon
Last week it was the Vatican, this week it's the Pentagon. I'm on a roll taking on mega-big institutions. I'm keeping an eye out for black helicopters piloted by Cardinal Maida outside of my office window.
But I have to take the Pentagon to task this week for sending openly gay and lesbian soldiers off to war.
I know what you're thinking: "But what about 'don't ask don't tell?' I thought they booted gays out. You know, threat to unit cohesion and all that."
It's true that the discriminatory DADT policy remains intact. However, it was recently uncovered that the Pentagon has had, in writing since 1999, a Forces Command regulation that calls for the active duty deployment of gay Reservists and National Guard troops to prevent soldiers from playing the "gay card" to get out of going to war. Of course, once they come back – if they come back – they're fair game for discharge under DADT.
This is wrong on many levels, but when you look at the Pentagon's longstanding argument against gay soldiers it goes something like this: "gay soldiers are icky and unmanly and would stare at the other soldier's penises in the communal showers if not openly grope them." I'm paraphrasing.
But the bottom line is that the Pentagon has long maintained that gays were such a threat they had to be purged at all costs. And what a considerable cost it has been both in taxpayer dollars and the ruined lives of gay servicemembers.
In 2004 Congressman Marty Meehan (D-MA) had the Government Accountability Office study the costs of discharging gay servicemembers under DADT. The conclusion? DADT has cost taxpayers over $200 million since 1993, the year DADT was put in place (thanks Clinton. Way to back us up).
Discharges for "homosexual conduct" have risen steadily since 1993. As The Washington Blade reported, "The number of gay discharges peaked in 2001 at 1,227, according to DOD figures. By 2004, as U.S. soldiers continued to fight the war in Iraq, the number of gay discharges dropped to 653."
It's no secret that the war in Iraq has severely sapped the military and that new recruits are not exactly flocking in. It's not that the military is so desperate they'll even let the homos fight the war, it's that they know the homos never posed a threat in the first place and in the face of troop shortages have had to acknowledge this.
Which means that even they don't believe in their own discriminatory ban.
So gays are allowed to risk their lives in a war zone, but the Pentagon won't respect their lives back home.
There's a growing push to have Congress repeal DADT. It is unfortunate that troop shortages in the face of the Iraq war is what has led many to support the repeal rather than the acknowledgement that gay and lesbian servicemembers have been serving their country with dignity and courage for decades and have fought in every war this country has waged.
However, it is long past time for DADT to go, and perhaps the stories of the brave men and women who have risked and even lost their lives defending a country that spends so much energy discriminating against them will finally be heard and will force many folks to reexamine their bigoted beliefs.
