Wednesday, 07.30.08

Military Injustice

HECTOR MATA/AFP/Getty Images

Last week, the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel hosted a hearing on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and its impact on military readiness.

In 1985, several years before President Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" compromise attempted to allow gays in the military to serve unmolested, I was a young soldier building bridges and blowing things up with C4 at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. That summer, my roommate was accused of having sex with another soldier in the barracks. The investigation, as I recall, was handled discreetly by our commanders: He was a well-liked Midwestern kid, and although no one could bring themselves to ask him about the inquiry, we all knew he was suffering.

I thought about my roommate during last week’s hearings on the impact of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" - an impact that has included drumming out military linguists with expertise in Arabic in the midst of a Middle Eastern war - and particularly during the testimony of Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, who spoke in defense of the ban on gay service members. Her comments are worth examining in detail.

Donnelly opened by lamenting that Clinton’s directive had, among other things, ordered the Defense Department to strike the question "Are you a homosexual?" from recruiting applications. She called for a return to exactly such snooping: "The routine inquiry about homosexuality can and should be reinstated now," Donnelly testified, adding: "We are talking about human sexuality, and the normal human, desire for personal privacy and modesty in sexual matters. Repealing the 1993 law would be tantamount to forcing female soldiers to cohabit with men in intimate quarters, on all military bases and ships at sea, on a 24/7 basis."

Redefining bigotry as modesty is certainly an interesting approach to defending discrimination. Does Donnelly actually believe gays will disappear from the ranks should the question about homosexuality be reinstated? Apparently so: Her testimony seemed to assume that there had never been sexual tension between men in a barracks, or at sea, before "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" complicated the question of gays in the military. But the more implausible part was still to come. Should homosexuals feel free to flaunt themselves, she argued, openly gay soldiers would use military regulations, and possibly civil rights protections, as weapons against straight soldiers who object to homosexuality. Moreover, Donnelly believes the military can expect an explosion of sexual battery against heterosexuals from notoriously "passive/aggressive" gays, citing the likelihood of cell-phone pornography in the showers, AIDS used as deadly weapon, and black lesbian gangs groping defenseless female soldiers.

There is a very small grain of truth in this fevered vision of military barracks transformed into bacchanalian drag shows. Some soldiers are violently immature about their sexuality, I‘ve seen that. Add an unexpected moment of self-doubt to anxiety, and no military legal code can keep, say, a pumped-up, trained-to-kill drunken kid from snapping and perhaps hurting another drunken kid over a crush. But pushing gays further back into the closet in the name of "privacy and modesty" won’t prevent this kind of thing from happening: It will neither relieve sexual tension nor remove homosexuals from the military. It's true that if gays are allowed to openly serve a self-imposed discretion will likely become the key to getting along. But it's personal choices, not legal suppression, that will establish social peace in the barracks. And it's galling, to say the least, to hear Donnelly suggest that heterosexual soldiers are too bigoted or emotionally stunted to reconcile their privately held views to the presence of gay soldiers in the ranks.

In the end, the inquiry involving my roommate was handled in a professional manner, and most of the company’s command were relieved, as I recall, when the accuser shamefully retracted his claim. I don’t even know if my roommate was gay. But the reaction to the inquiry, and the way our superiors dealt with it, tells me that there were, even then, enough mature adults in the armed forces to handle the fears and controversies associated with sexual ambiguity. I’m sure the same maturity exists today. If gay soldiers were to openly serve beginning tomorrow, for a time the military would be unsettled, undoubtedly. But they are, after all, soldiers. They can tough it out.

— Rafael Enrique Valero

Filed Under: Don't Ask Don't Tell, Gays, Military

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