McCain Wants To Charge America Another $4.4 Million To ‘Study’ DADT

I remember an old joke, popular when I was a child: A driver is sitting at a traffic light. The light changes several times and after a few minutes, a police officer says to the driver, “What’s the matter? Don’t we have any colors you like?”

This is the exact same thing we’re doing by humoring Senator John McCain. After twenty-two studies on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military spent another $4.4 million dollars this year to “study” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” yet again. This time, it was to study how to best repeal the unconstitutional law.

But Sunday, Senator McCain, the leading opponent of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” said on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” “we need a thorough and complete study of the effects – not how to implement a repeal, but the effects on morale and battle effectiveness.”

CBS reports, “McCain said he thinks the report should be subject to further scrutiny, however, and that the Senate should not lift the ban on allowing gays to serve openly in the military during Congress’s lame duck session, which kicked off this week.

“Once we get this study, we need to have hearings. And we need to examine it. And we need to look at whether it’s the kind of study that we wanted,” he said.”

Adam Serwer gets it right.

“Good news for McCain: A study of that kind was already conducted in 1993 by the Rand Corporation. That study, which looked at the effect of allowing gays and lesbians to work as police, firefighters, and serve as soldiers in foreign militaries, found that there was no danger in allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. The reason was that while gay and lesbian servicemembers serving openly might undermine “social cohesion,” it wouldn’t undermine “task cohesion,” which is the only factor that impacts military effectiveness. In spite of the evidence, the politics and prevailing cultural prejudices of the time resulted in the “compromise” policy of allowing gays and lesbians to serve as long as they conceal their orientation. The truth is that we’ve known that this kind of social diversity doesn’t hurt the military since the government studied integrated units during the Korean War in the 1950s. When it comes to foxholes, bigotry is less common than atheism.

“For McCain and the GOP, this isn’t about principle, it isn’t about empiricism, and given the way that DADT actively harms military effectiveness, it most definitely is not about national security. It’s about ideology.”

So, Senator McCain, despite the fact that a preliminary release of the report shows that fully seventy percent of American servicemembers either don’t care if their foxhole mate is gay or straight, you want the American people to pay millions of dollars more to study something that fully seventy-eight percent of Americans don’t have an issue with in the first place?

Talk about a bridge to nowhere.