The United States seems to be constantly finding new and
inventive ways to get around the concept of freedom. With illegal
wiretaps, the administration is using the
“fascism-is-effective” campaign. In Guantanamo Bay, the
White House is plainly saying it doesn’t care, and in the
military the Department of Defense’s strategy to get around
the law essentially amounts to plugging its ears and shouting,
“I can’t hear you!”
The Defense Department’s “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy has been all over the news lately,
because of a recent University of California-commissioned study
which reports that the financial cost of the policy ““ that
is, the money lost in training, housing and feeding otherwise
suitable soldiers who have been dismissed because they were found
to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender ““ amounts to a
startling $364 million.
One member of the commission, Lawrence Korb, said in a
Washington Post article, “The real issue here is that you
have a policy that is costing us money, hurting readiness and is
really not fulfilling any national-security objective.” The
U.S. armed forces have a recruiting policy whose very foundations
lie in the notion that ignorance is bliss, and the “real
issue” is monetary?
Only decrying the money lost in this policy is like complaining
that Jim Crow laws force taxpayers to waste money on two separate
drinking fountains. It’s such a superlative display of
nonsense that I am half-expecting politicians to declare their
final victory over reason and take the rest of the year off.
There is a certain bitter, humorless irony in the image of our
armed forces going to the other side of the world to spread
freedom, while the very institution sending them has a law
dictating who and what they are allowed to be.
So the status quo remains that so long as you can adequately
conceal your homosexuality you can remain in the armed forces. And
while this law treats those in the LGBT community as second-class
citizens and directly infringes on their civil rights, the debate
is about money.
“It was a poor plan to begin with,” says theater
Professor Gary Gardner, who, in addition to having been with UCLA
for about 30 years, is openly gay. “Gays are still the
“˜other’ in American society.” In the time line of
civil rights, we seem to be stuck on the
“separate-but-equal” phase.
The time has come for toothless half-measures to be replaced
with actual progress. Should we scrap the “don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy because it costs Joe Taxpayer money?
No. We should scrap the “don’t ask, don’t
tell” policy because it’s absurd.
There is no good reason why the military should be exempt from
the standard of civil rights that we as Americans claim as our own.
But I am not saying that suddenly transforming the military into an
open institution would be clean and painless, because it
wouldn’t.
One concern is that it may be counterproductive to the financial
issue that caused this topic to re-emerge in the first place.
Charles Moskos, Northwestern sociology professor and one of the
designers of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said
in a Washington Post interview that allowing openly gay people in
the military could make prospective recruits squeamish about
sharing closed quarters, thereby causing numbers to drop.
Also, there would almost certainly be a rise in intermilitary
hate crimes. The unfortunate thing about the status quo is that
even if it is morally corrupt, there is always a sizeable amount of
people who will resist changes. Both of these arguments are used by
supporters of the policy who think that “don’t ask,
don’t tell” should be left as is, but neither argument
is good enough to justify an institutionalized policy of bigotry
and intolerance. The status quo is not a reason. It’s not
even a good excuse.
Questioning the moral implications of homosexuality is like
questioning the moral implications of having green eyes. There is
no moral implication, no right and wrong. It simply exists. And
while I know there are many people who do not agree with me on that
point, the Constitution of the United States does.
It’s likely that military personnel who have a problem
with homosexuality are going to stay that way, and especially
likely if the military itself is indirectly calling homosexuality a
shameful taboo.
“The military is a huge part of our national
identity,” explains Arthur Little, an openly gay UCLA English
professor, “and the terror is that gay men and women cannot
be imagined as part of that national identity. It’s a
question of citizenship.”
Breaking down social barriers is never easy, and the people who
have done it are the people we remember as heroes: Susan B.
Anthony, Jackie Robinson and Nelson Mandela, to name a few. In
January, an ABC-affiliated news station in Connecticut interviewed
a 19-year-old naval apprentice named John Graff, who decided to
come out of the closet and openly challenge the “don’t
ask, don’t tell” policy.
“By keeping it to myself I’m just participating with
the policy which I think is wrong,” Graff said, “and
change isn’t going to come that way.”
If individuals in the military want to keep their homosexuality
a secret, so be it, but there is no good reason to keep intolerance
an institution. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is
a ridiculous rule, and if a just and free military is the goal, it
must be forced by outside hands. It’s not going to be easy.
It’s never easy. It’s right.
E-mail O’Bryan at jobryan@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.