Forces Pushing Obama on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

Forces Pushing Obama on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/us/politics/01military.html?th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — President Obama and top Pentagon officials met repeatedly over the past year about repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the law that bans openly gay members of the military.

But it was in Oval Office strategy sessions to review court cases challenging the ban — ones that could reach the Supreme Court — that Mr. Obama faced the fact that if he did not change the policy, his administration would be forced to defend publicly the constitutionality of a law he had long opposed.

As a participant recounted one of the sessions, Mr. Obama told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that the law was “just wrong.” Mr. Obama told them, the participant said, that he had delayed acting on repeal because the military was stretched in two wars and he did not want another polarizing debate in 2009 to distract from his health care fight.

But in 2010, he told them, this would be a priority. He got no objections.

On Tuesday, in the first Congressional hearing on the issue in 17 years, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen will unveil the Pentagon’s initial plans for carrying out a repeal, which requires an act of Congress. Gay rights leaders say they expect Mr. Gates to announce in the interim that the Defense Department will not take action to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners, one of the most onerous aspects of the law. Pentagon officials had no comment.

Gay rights groups are calling the hearing historic even as they question how quickly the administration is prepared to act. But Republicans are already signaling that they are not eager to take up the issue.

“In the middle of two wars and in the middle of this giant security threat,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, “why would we want to get into this debate?”

Still, it is undeniable that a variety of 21st-century forces — a new generation in the military, a change in climate at the top levels of the Pentagon, pressure on the president from a critical interest group, even Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand’s anticipated Democratic primary battle in New York — converged to begin repeal of a 1993 law that has led to the discharge of more than 13,000 gay men and lesbians, including desperately needed Arabic translators.

As Mr. Gates told Mr. Obama last year, it was no longer a question of if the ban would be repealed, but when, said the meeting participant, who declined to be named to discuss internal White House deliberations.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Obama regularly pledged to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but in his first year in office he refused to set a timetable and said so little publicly about the issue that gay rights leaders, an important constituency, grew increasingly angry.

Pentagon officials, who were busy withdrawing forces from Iraq and escalating the war in Afghanistan, were pleased that the president was stalling. In April, Mr. Gates told reporters that he and the president wanted to push the issue “down the road a bit.”

In New York, Ms. Gillibrand, a former House member from a conservative upstate district who had just been appointed to the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, was moving to the left on several issues in anticipation of a primary this year.

In June she met with Lt. Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and an Arabic linguist and infantry officer in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. Lieutenant Choi is facing a discharge for announcing to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC in March that he was gay.

“This policy asked him to lie every day, and it was antithetical to everything he had learned in the military,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview. In July she tried and failed to introduce a bill for an 18-month moratorium on discharges and instead said she asked Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who leads the Armed Services Committee, to hold a hearing on the issue.

Since then, Ms. Gillibrand has frequently told reporters that Harold E. Ford Jr., a former five-term Democratic congressman from Tennessee who is weighing a run for her seat, voted twice in favor of legislation to make same-sex marriage illegal. (Mr. Ford says he has changed his mind.)

Despite Ms. Gillibrand’s efforts, little happened on the issue over the summer, although Mr. Gates asked his legal counsel to determine if the Pentagon could avoid a discharge if a service member’s sexual orientation was revealed by someone else. “If somebody is outed by a third party, does that force us to take action?” he asked in late June.

By September, when any hearings would have been subsumed by the intense deliberations at the White House and Pentagon about escalating the war in Afghanistan, there was a small but telling sign of change: an article in Admiral Mullen’s military journal, Joint Force Quarterly, called “don’t ask, don’t tell” a failure and said no evidence supported the claim that allowing openly gay men and lesbians to serve would undercut unit cohesion.

In December, after the Afghanistan debate was over and Mr. Obama had announced the deployment of 30,000 more troops, Admiral Mullen convened a small group to prepare for what would finally be Mr. Levin’s hearings. There was hardly unanimity.

Although Pentagon officials were of the view that the younger rank and file did not care much about serving with openly gay service members, Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, had major reservations. But as a practical matter, the military would follow the orders of the commander in chief.

Polls now show that a majority of Americans support openly gay service — a majority did not in 1993 — but there have been no recent broad surveys of the 1.4 million active-duty personnel.

A 2008 census by The Military Times of predominantly Republican and largely older subscribers found that 58 percent opposed to efforts to repeal the policy; in 2006, a poll by Zogby International of 545 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans found that three-quarters were comfortable around gay service members.

At the White House, Mr. Obama decided at a meeting shortly before Christmas to use his State of the Union address to reaffirm his support for repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.” A White House official said that Mr. Obama’s call for repeal stayed through six drafts of the speech, despite reports of internal battles over how far he should go.

As Tuesday’s hearing approaches, no one is predicting that the issue will be easy.

Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a research group that focuses on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said he expected Mr. Gates to announce on Tuesday that the Pentagon would end discharges based on third-party accusations, but also that it would move slowly, which Mr. Belkin opposes.

“By signaling that integration is a complicated, fragile process and slow-rolling it over a number of years, you give obstructionists in the military the chance to stir up trouble in their units,” he said.