Today, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Became Even More Dishonorable

Obama’s Call For 21,000 Troops To Afghanistan Makes Gay Troops Indispensable

 

Today, President Obama announced far-reaching plans that commit the United States to aggressive action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, possibly for the next quarter-century. Initially, the president is asking for $1.5 billion each year for the next five years, and is ordering 21,000 additional U.S. troops to train Afghan security forces, and hundreds of civilians from the State Department and other US Government agencies to assist the Afghan government.

Where are all these people going to come from? 

Think about this for a moment:

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue”, the law of the land since 1993, is responsible for the discharge of over 12,000 service men and women, at a direct cost of over $363 million – and those figures are only through 2006. And that doesn’t even take into account the actual value those men and women added to the military.

Consider this post I wrote just a few weeks ago:

Nathaniel Frank, author of “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America”, appeared on The Daily Show last night and offered an interesting theory: The military’s ban on gays is in part responsible for the success of the 9/11 attacks. 

It’s well-known that the military has discharged dozens of Arabic linguistics because of their homosexuality.

About four minutes into the video, Frank says, “You know that on September 10th, 2001, the U.S. government intercepted a cable that said, ‘Tomorrow is zero-hour.’ It wasn’t translated until the 12th because we didn’t have enough Arabic linguists.”

Think about that again: “didn’t have enough Arabic linguists.”

The military has fired over 12,000 people, the sole reason for their termination is because they are gay.

Just a handful of those people, possibly just one, could have been the difference between 9/11 being just a warm day in September, and the day 3000 innocent people died and the world was changed forever.

I’ll go one step further: Taking Nathaniel Frank’s premise, had we translated that cable and been able to act, the global economy wouldn’t be in such terrible shape right now. The US wouldn’t be spending an average of ten billion dollars a month, for the past six years, in Iraq. The bailouts wouldn’t be as damaging to the economy, to the strength of the US dollar, because we’d have more money around. 

If you’ve lost your job because of the recession, there’s a chance you wouldn’t have, had 9/11 not happened, had we not gone into Iraq, had we kept our eye on the ball in other areas. Tell me I’m playing the “what-if” game if you want, but these are serious “what-ifs”.

Regardless of your personal view of homosexuality, regardless of your personal view of gays in the military, the fact is that gay men and women have served in the military since there was a military. The fact is that in many other countries, gay men and women serve in the military, openly, without damaging “unit cohesion”, which is a made-up term that had no meaning until “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had to actually be justified.

In 2003, ten years after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell became law, 91% of military-aged men and women “were supportive of allowing gays to serve openly, as were 85 percent of all women, and 73 percent of all men.” Last year, 75% of Americans “said gay people who are open about their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, up from 62 percent in early 2001 and 44 percent in 1993.”

And the fact is that our troops have done double, triple tours of duty, their time home has been compromised, their families have had to shoulder the burden of lost wages and lost companionship. Surely, if you were to ask every soldier if twelve thousand openly gay men and women were back in the armed forces, and they could in turn spend more time with their own families, surely they would say, “yes”.

Two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili and Colin Powell have said, “Yes.”
Senator Sam Nunn has said “Yes.”
113 Congressmen in the US House of Representatives have said, “Yes.”

It’s time for you to say “Yes”, too. 

 

(photo: dbking)