Integrity News

Last week I wrote about how former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn was calling for a reevaluation of the currently policy on homosexual conduct in the Armed Forces. All I could think to myself was, “How many more studies need to be done?” There has already been so much research that people are tired of it. The poor horse has been beaten so many times it looks more like a goat now!

Congress just needs to sit down and go through it again and do the right thing this time. Well, Aubrey Sarvis, Executive Director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, must have been thinking the same thing when he wrote this piece for the Huffington Post:

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Here’s the heart of his piece:

A Pentagon study! We need another Pentagon study? How many studies have there been? The Navy commissioned what is known as the Crittenden Report in 1957. Thirty years later the Defense Security Research and Education Center (PERSEREC) confirmed the Crittenden findings and found no data to support the ban on gays in the military. The Pentagon didn’t want to hear that and ten years later they sent PERSEREC back for another look. The second report went even farther than the first, finding that “gay service members fared better than their heterosexual counterparts in most areas of adjustment, including school behavior and cognitive ability.” Because the first report caused much hand-wringing in the corridors of the E-Ring, the second report was never submitted.

The Pentagon asked the independent Rand Corporation to take a look at the issue in 1993, between the two PERSEREC reports and after President Clinton signed a memorandum directing the military to end discrimination based on sexual orientation. Rand produced an exhaustive analysis from outside. Their researchers visited seven countries and the police and fire departments of six American cities. They reviewed the scientific literature. They focused on what happened after President Truman signed the executive order ending racial segregation in the military. (Essentially nothing.) They sampled public opinion. They interviewed active-duty military personnel — and on and on. God knows what all this cost the taxpayer. You’ll never guess what Rand concluded: “sexual orientation [is] not germane to determining who may serve in the military.”

I was in the Army for three years — sometimes, as Senator Nunn used to say, “in tight quarters” - and I could have told them that. It would have cost them nothing.

Nonetheless, and despite the mounting pile of favorable reports, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell and Senator Nunn decided they needed their own report. Thus another Pentagon “study.” That fore-ordained report took the position that allowing homosexuals — openly gay men and women — into the military was just too nervous-making. For them if no one else. They ignored the independent Rand report. They ignored all the other independent reports, finding it easier just to fall back on their old, familiar, comfortable prejudices. And so, with the backing of Senator Nunn and General Powell, most of Congress, and yes, President Clinton, we got the patently discriminatory law making every homosexual American a second class citizen of his country. They pronounced the law a compromise and called it “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The passage of DADT was not a moment that will be viewed with pride in the history of this land.