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DADT: Goodbye Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Hello To A New Civil Rights Movement

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When Tanya Domi joined the Women’s Army Corps 37 years ago as a “slick sleeve” Private in 1974, she had no idea how the “Gay Ban” military policy which preceded “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ” by  52 years would affect her life. Its ultimate repeal, fought successfully by a new generation of veterans and activists marks the beginning of a new civil rights movement in America. 

Today is a special day in American history. Indeed, the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law marks a major advancement in America’s political compact to create a “more perfect union” by extending the right to gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. As of this morning at 12:01 a.m. in all time zones across the planet, for the first time in the 235 years since the U.S. Military was established, gays may serve openly in uniform without fear of discharge.

I would have never imagined how much the gay ban in the military would affect my life when I enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps in 1974 (I was not out to myself, let alone to anyone else when I enlisted.) The gay ban, most recently known as DADT, which became law in 1993, became a part of my daily venacular since that day in 1974 when I was called into a dark investigator’s office at Ft. Devens, Massachusetts, was read my Miranda rights and was charged with the crime of “homosexuality,” following an innocent first visit to a gay bar in Boston.

By the time the Ft. Devens witchhunt for lesbians took place in the mid-1970s, the American government  had officially discriminated against gays and lesbians who served in the military for 33 years, a practice initiated by psychiatrists who had pathologized homosexuality in a new policy created to actively exclude them from the ranks (see Coming Out Under Fire, by Alan Berube) as America launched a draft effort that would brings millions of Americans into uniform during World War II.

Most recently, the American media–populated by lazy journalists–have regularly portrayed DADT absent the factual history of an American government that has viciously pursued homosexuals in the ranks for more than two centuries. Since the days of General George Washington and the Continental Army, the American government had been meting out punishments to homosexuals. Under Washington, homosexuals were “drummed out” and tarred and feathered, and court martialed. Later, homosexuals were imprisoned for sodomy, delivered sentencing that included hard labor in maximum security prisons, or imprisoned in Navy brigs, which included the added indignity of being fed “bread and water.” Others were given nonjudicial punishment that resulted in the reduction of rank, and issuance of life-altering derogatory discharges that were characterized as “other than honorable,” “bad conduct,” and even, “dishonorable and psychiatric discharges.” Most recently, policy migrated to applying financial penalties which began under President George H. W. Bush in 1991, which applied a 50 percent reduction in benefits, not withstanding the receipt of an honorable discharge.

Today, as the bells of freedom ring across America for lesbian, gay, bisexual (but NOT trans persons) in the military, the sky won’t fall, gay marches will not ensue on military bases (although, why not?) gays in uniforms will not mob barracks or officer clubs in flaunting flamingo dances, ultimately belying the unfounded red-herring claims of wild-eyed, virulently anti-gay activist Elaine Donnelly. (Could we be so lucky that Donnelly will recede into history too?)

Indeed, while many across America today will celebrate this great moment, a new generation of LGBTQ activists, dominated by the “Millenials,” will mark this victory by taking to the streets in dozens of actions across the country, to illuminate the vast inequality of LGBT Americans under federal civil law, led by GetEQUAL, a national organization dedicated to applying the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience.  GetEQUAL played a decisive role in the demise of DADT when a number of activists–including Iraq war veteran Lt. Dan Choi– chained themselves to the White House fence, bringing a new image to the face of discrimination in America and no doubt, caused consternation within the Obama White House.

GetEQUAL arrived on the national scene during the most recent battle to take down “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,”  emerging to play a classic activist, outsider role, and, while sometimes disconcerting to mainstream groups such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), gave the DADT repeal effort the necessary political pressure to finally repeal legalized discrimination in the military.

GetEQUAL did not come out of “nowhere,” it was founded by a number of people, most prominently its director Robin McGehee.

McGehee, a lesbian and mother of two from Mississippi, had moved to Fresno, and became a co-director of the National Equality March and the Meet in the Middle March 4 Equality of 2009. She, along with many others, was radicalized by California voters who in November 2008 supported Proposition 8, overturning marriage equality for lesbians and gays by way of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between same-sex partners, reversing the California Supreme Court’s 2008 decision.

McGehee repeatedly says, she would rather spend time with her family than take on this fight for equality, but because she knows that discrimination must be challenged, she has stepped forward in very brave and decisive ways, emerging as one of America’s top leaders in the LGBTQ civil rights movement today.

In August, McGehee, along with Heather Cronk, the managing director of GetEQUAL, brought 92 activists from 25 states and the District of Columbia together in Memphis, Tennessee for a national meeting and training to discuss how the LGBTQ activist community can move forward in a nationally strategic and tactical manner that will advance our new civil rights movement toward full federal equality. Cronk a community activist, with superlative management and organizing skills, put together the training in collaboration with United We Dream immigration activists and community organizers, working and planning together in an unprecedented manner to advance the rights of the LGBTQ community. In Memphis, McGehee called on activists to take bold action around the country and put pressure on elected officials from California to Maine. Today, that plan and those actions are happening in 12 different locations across the country.

At the stroke of midnight today, McGehee tweeted, “Deep love & respect to ALL individuals & orgs who helped take us another step closer to = “.  GetEQUAL understands that we can’t achieve equality through one strategy alone–we must work together as a civil rights movement and use all political sticks and carrots to move our equality agenda forward and not leave anyone behind in a community that should and can be lead by principled leadership at all levels of activism.

Let me raise a flag and plant one too:  I joined GetEQUAL’s board recently because I don’t choose to wait another 40 years to achieve federal equality for LGBT people. I want to see and experience full federal equality in my lifetime. Watching GetEQUAL take on the Obama Administration’s double talk and delay tactics made me a true believer in bringing back principled non-violent civil disobedience as a legitimate tool in organizing for equality. That stick disappeared when ActUp! faded from the scene in the 1990s. GetEQUAL has replaced it at a vital moment in our history.

So as we shift from “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to expand our civil rights further, including trans rights in the military, my personal life involves a loving commitment to my Canadian partner, whom I have been with for nearly the past six years. We met and fell in love in New York City, our home. Under the NAFTA trade agreement my partner can legally work in America, but she does not have the right to permanent resident status through her work permit alone. These work permits are approved for three-year periods and must be renewed in order for her to remain in New York City. Because of DOMA, our relationship does not qualify for immigration status entitling her to live and work freely in the United States on a permanent basis.

In the new post-repeal military, I do believe that its leadership will not be exactly comfortable with the inequality of our gay families’ lives who are on active duty. To be denied housing and health care benefits because of DOMA, soldiers will sadly worry, for good reason, about the well-being of their families, thus distracting them from the mission at hand. This inequality will come into stark relief during the course of regular military life and ultimately, that unfairness delivered by the hands of DOMA, must face the glaring spotlight that we activists must directly expose.

This is a happy day for some of us in our community, but none of us should ever be satisfied or complacent with progress for one part of the community. GetEQUAL is going to be around to remind not only the community, but the rest of country, that we are not equal until all of us become fully equal under America’s laws.

Let me leave you with the words of the poet Langston Hughes wrote in “Democracy”:

I tire so of hearing people say, 
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

There is a great need for more equality. We are not done. We are not finished, until we are all equal together as one. Meet you at the barricades until we GetEQUAL.

 

 

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.

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OPINION

Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’

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April 26, 2024

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Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a top potential Trump vice presidential running mate pick, revealed in a forthcoming book she “hated” her 14-month old puppy and shot it to death. Massive online outrage ensued, including accusations of “animal cruelty” and “cold-blooded murder,” but the pro-life former member of Congress is defending her actions and bragging she had the media “gasping.”

“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes in her soon-to-be released book, according to The Guardian which reports “the dog, a female, had an ‘aggressive personality’ and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.”

“By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life’.”

“Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, ‘grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another’.”

READ MORE: President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off

“Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like ‘a trained assassin’.”

Except Cricket wasn’t trained. Online several people with experience training dogs have said Noem did everything wrong.

“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling the young girl pup “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”

“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”

“It was not a pleasant job,” she added, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

The Guardian reports Noem went on that day to slaughter a goat that “smelled ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”

She dragged both animals separately into a gravel pit and shot them one at a time. The puppy died after one shell, but the goat took two.

On social media Noem expressed no regret, no sadness, no empathy for the animals others say did not need to die, and certainly did not need to die so cruelly.

READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’

But she did use the opportunity to promote her book.

Attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold says Governor Noem’s actions might have violated state law.

“You slaughtered a 14-month-old puppy because it wasn’t good at the ‘job’ you chose for it?” he asked. “SD § 40-1-2.3. ‘No person owning or responsible for the care of an animal may neglect, abandon, or mistreat the animal.'”

The Democratic National Committee released a statement saying, “Kristi Noem’s extreme record goes beyond bizarre rants about killing her pets – she also previously said a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to carry out her pregnancy, does not support exceptions for rape or incest, and has threatened to throw pharmacists in jail for providing medication abortions.”

Former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host on “The View” wrote, “There are countless organizations that re-home dogs from owners who are incapable of properly training and caring for them.”

The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson blasted the South Dakota governor.

“Kristi Noem is trash,” he began. “Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.”

“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog,” he added. “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel…but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”

Melissa Jo Peltier, a writer and producer of the “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” series, also heaped strong criticism on Noem.

“After 10+ years working with Cesar Millan & other highly specialized trainers, I believe NO dog should be put down just because they can’t or won’t do what we decide WE want them to,” Peltier said in a lengthy statement. “Dogs MUST be who they are. Sadly, that’s often who WE teach them to be. And our species is a hot mess. I would have happily taken Kristi Noem’s puppy & rehomed it. What she did is animal cruelty & cold blooded murder in my book.”

READ MORE: ‘Blood on Your Hands’: Tennessee Republicans OK Arming Teachers After Deadly School Shooting

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OPINION

President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off

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April 26, 2024

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President Joe Biden gave an nearly-unannounced, last-minute, live exclusive interview Friday morning to Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio host who for decades, from the mid-1990s to about 2015, was a top Trump friend, fan, and aficionado. But the impetus behind the President’s move appears to be a rare and unsigned statement from the The New York Times Company, defending the “paper of record” after months of anger from the public over what some say is its biased negative coverage of the Biden presidency and, especially, a Thursday report by Politico claiming Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is furious the President has refused to give the “Grey Lady” an in-person  interview.

“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico reported. “Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”

“In Sulzberger’s view,” Politico explained, “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”

But it was this statement that made Politico’s scoop go viral.

READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

“’All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,’ one Times journalist said. ‘It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.'”

Popular Information founder Judd Legum in March documented The New York Times’ (and other top papers’) obsession with Biden’s age after the Hur Report.

Thursday evening the Times put out a “scorching” statement, as Politico later reported, not on the newspaper’s website but on the company’s corporate website, not addressing the Politico piece directly but calling it “troubling” that President Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”

Media watchers and critics pushed back on the Times’ statement.

READ MORE: ‘To Do God Knows What’: Local Elections Official Reads Lara Trump the Riot Act

“NYT issues an unprecedented statement slamming Biden for ‘actively and effectively avoid[ing] questions from independent journalists during his term’ and claiming it’s their ‘independence’ that Biden dislikes, when it’s actually that they’re dying to trip him up,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.

Froomkin also pointed to a 2017 report from Poynter, a top journalism site published by The Poynter Institute, that pointed out the poor job the Times did of interviewing then-President Trump.

Others, including former Biden Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, debunked the Times’ claim President Biden hasn’t given interviews to independent journalists by pointing to Biden’s interviews with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and a 20-minute sit-down interview with veteran journalist John Harwood for ProPublica.

Former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob, now a media critic who publishes Stop the Presses, offered a more colorful take of Biden’s decision to go on Howard Stern.

The Times itself just last month reported on a “wide-ranging interview” President Biden gave to The New Yorker.

Watch the video and read the social media posts above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Doesn’t Care if Pregnant Women Live or Die’: Alito Slammed Over Emergency Abortion Remarks

 

 

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CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial

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April 26, 2024

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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.

“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.

“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.

READ MORE: ‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’

Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.

On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”

On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”

After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:

“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.

“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”

READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

 

 

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