Cal Berkeley Democrats

My views on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

So, after the PVC meeting the other night, I decided to write down some thoughts, and my thoughts kind of just turned into this. =]

Aside from marriage, probably the largest, and most controversial, issue faced by the gay community today is the policy infamously known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. As is well known, DADT was signed into law early in the Clinton years, after the new president met much backlash from Congress over this issue. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been a failed policy ever since, and worse yet, it has instituted the very discrimination that Clinton was trying to avoid.

Many proponents of DADT have stated that it would protect unit cohesiveness and that if gays were to serve openly in the armed forces combat effectiveness would deteriorate. This same argument was used when President Truman issued an executive order, racially integrating the military. Now, I’m not an expert on military matters, but I keep up with the news on quite a regular basis, so maybe I am just reading the wrong articles, because I haven’t heard much about the degradation of morale and combat effectiveness since blacks have entered the armed services. Why are we under the impression that our men and women in uniform could not fight effectively if they were to be serving with a soldier from the gay community?

Thousands upon thousands of highly qualified soldiers have been discharged simply due to their sexual orientation. Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenback, after earning countless medals, and saving countless lives, is about to be discharged simply due to the fact that he is gay. Not only is this policy discriminatory, but it is also a huge waste of money. If we consider the amount of money put into each individual soldier for training alone, and then factor in the almost 13,000 soldiers that have been discharged, we see that hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted on this one policy alone.

Even worse than this, is that, due to DADT, discrimination against gays has become institutionalized. It was one thing, before DADT, for military recruiters and commanders not to allow gays to serve outright; however, the fact that there is a law on the books that says to gays that they cannot serve is shameful and wrong. And I, not only as a member of the gay community, but also as a citizen of this country, am disgusted. It should be insulting to every citizen of this great nation to know that one must be straight to fight and die for one’s nation. This country was not founded on the principles of bigotry and homophobia; however, this outrageous and ludicrous law would cause many to question that statement.

Furthermore, it is slightly depressing to hear President Obama say that DADT won’t be tackled until sometime in 2010. I understand he is worried about holding the House and Senate, but it is still disheartening to hear know that the gay community is not as important, and DADT is not as big of an issue to him as his campaign made it seem. It is hard to know that he would rather just put the issue of, rather than come out on the right side and fight it with all his strength. Equality should never take a backseat. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a very controversial topic, yet had it not been tackled, where would we be now? Even if it is not politically popular, equality must take center stage.

Abraham Lincoln once named America as a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men [and women] are created equal.” We, as a nation, have made great strides in this direction, but we have also let some things and some groups of people fall by the roadside. In our quest toward equality, we cannot only look to some and forget the rest. This is not the nation of the few and privileged, but instead, the great melting pot. The diversity of this nation is what makes it so great. The never-ending push towards equality is what makes this nation worth fighting for. We fight so that one day, we will all have the equal choice to do what we want and fight for what we believe in.