Repeal means that for the first time in U.S. history, gays will be openly accepted by the military and can acknowledge their sexual orientation without fear of being discharged. More than 13,500 service members have been dismissed under the 1993 law. Before that, they had been explicitly barred from military service since World War I.
The change won't take immediate effect, however. The legislation says the president and his top military advisers must certify that lifting the ban won't hurt troops' fighting ability. After that, there's a 60-day waiting period for the military.
As I mentioned recently, this was inevitable; although I am not confident that now is the time. Of course, under the new law, now is not quite the time. Ending the practice of discharging open homosexual troops will require a finding that this won't harm the military (that will be provided).
Still, I am suspicious of the practical effects on gay Americans of lifting the ban. I've never bought the numbers thrown about of gays expelled from the miltiary under the law. Really, playing the gay card to get out of the military was one way to escape service that otherwise you are required to complete even if you discover you've made a horrible mistake. Say you're gay, and you'll be back on the block in no time. Given trends in society that make it likely that ending the ban would one day take place, getting out that way has less stigma than it once would have had.
But the new law is the law, as much as the old law was the law. The military will comply and make the best of it; trying to win our wars while they do so.
UPDATE: As I said, the continued reports of high discharges as if the military was actively rooting out gay troops are misleading:
Certainly there have been some unjustified separations under the policy which came to known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (the case of the highly qualified Air Force pilot named Mike Almy, who was discharged after e-mails to his boyfriend were discovered on a work-related e-mail account, comes to mind). But a few years ago, Charles Moskos, the late military sociologist who drafted the DADT language, went back to study discharges under the policy. He found that about 80 percent were voluntary, meaning they had been initiated by the soldier.
In other words, a guy or girl had gone to his or her CO and said something to the effect of, “You know, I’m gay.” This earned the serviceperson an honorable discharge — and maybe a relatively painless end to what might have been an inconvenient service contract.
In a study a few months ago, the Pentagon affirmed Moskos’s research, finding that “approximately 85% of discharges for homosexual conduct have been made on the basis of statements by the Service member.” It also noted that “approximately one quarter of these discharges have occurred in the first four months of a Service member’s service,” which would seem to back up the notion that DADT was widely used as way to get out of contracts.
And the “tellers” weren’t necessarily gay. As one Col. Om Prakash put it in a 2009 report for the U.S. War College, one possible explanation for the rise of discharges for homosexuality observed after DADT was that “given the recent reduction in stigma associated with homosexuality in society at large, simply declaring one is homosexual, whether true or not, is the fastest way to avoid further military commitment and receive an honorable discharge.”
And for this, our elite universities punished the military that defends us all by keeping out ROTC based on what Congress did close to two decades ago. I'd have had more respect for the so-called courage of these universities if they'd declined all federal financial support appropriated by Congress to punish them for the law.
