“One of the things that is most important to me is personal integrity. And a policy or a law that, in affect, requires people to lie gives me a problem. I think it’s…we spend a lot of time in the military talking about integrity and honor and values. Telling the truth is a pretty important value in that scale it’s a very important value. And so for me, and I thought the Admiral was, that Admiral Mullen was eloquent on this last February, a policy that requires people to lie about themselves somehow seems to me fundamentally flawed.”
— Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates, on the seventeenth anniversary of the signing into law of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” speaking in favor of its repeal.