Obama needs to keep this promise

Obama needs to keep this promise
By Clarence Page
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
October 14, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1014pageoct14,0,3365558.column


As if he didn't have enough headaches. President Barack Obama has to decide whether to deploy more troops to the Afghanistan war and whether gays and lesbians will be allowed to serve openly in the military.

Although confidential surveys show thousands are serving, officially homosexuals still are banned from military service unless they are willing to comply with a hastily constructed "don't ask, don't tell" policy that Congress passed in 1993. In short: Your superiors won't ask whether you're a gay, lesbian or bisexual as long as you stay in the closet.

As a presidential candidate, Obama promised to be a fierce advocate for gays in the fight to overturn don't ask, don't tell. As president, he still is an advocate. But fierce? Not at all. And some in the gay rights community are getting mightily impatient.

Maverick conservative and openly gay blogger Andrew Sullivan eloquently endorsed Obama's candidacy, but you could not tell from Sullivan's review of Obama's Saturday speech to the Human Rights Campaign, the world's largest gay political group. "(The president) failed every test," Sullivan wrote on The Atlantic magazine's Web site, by offering no specifics on key issues. "This speech," Sullivan wrote, "was highfalutin bull (bleep)." Censorship mine.

I appreciate Sullivan's point. I used to think that allowing gays in the military would weaken national security. I have since discovered how much our national security would be weakened without them.

I was led to this view not so much by what military people have said but by what military commanders have done. The discharge numbers indicate that tolerance for gays and lesbians in the ranks actually rises sharply when the military is called upon to perform its primary mission, which is to fight wars.

Discharges under don't ask, don't tell doubled to 1,273 in 2001, from 617 in 1994, the Defense Department reports. But, despite assertions by the Pentagon that nothing has changed, discharges under the don't ask, don't tell law took a nose dive after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to new wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2007 such discharges dropped sharply to 627.

It even has become a challenge for some gay personnel to get themselves discharged after revealing their homosexuality on purpose. Some who came out of the closet on purpose, like Army Sgt. Darren Manzella, were told to get back in. Manzella, whose story was on "60 Minutes," served as an openly gay soldier for more than two years before he was honorably discharged in 2008.

The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group formed in response to don't ask, don't tell, estimated more than 500 gay troops are serving openly. For their commanders, don't ask, don't tell apparently has become "look the other way and keep marching."

Attitudes toward equal rights for gays appear to have evolved within the military as they have in the civilian world. A 2006 Zogby International poll found 73 percent of military personnel were comfortable with the idea of serving with gays and lesbians. About one in four U. S. troops who served in Afghanistan or Iraq told Zogby pollsters they knew a member of their unit who was gay.

Today's military and the reporters who cover them report a generation gap in the ranks on this issue. The older personnel are opposed to gays and lesbians serving openly. The younger ones tend not to think of the issue as a big deal. They have bigger issues to worry about. Or, as we used to say about racial integration when I was a Vietnam War Army draftee, there are no bigots in foxholes.

A group of 28 retired generals and admirals, including retired Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a letter in 2007 calling on Congress to repeal the don't ask, don't tell act. Yet the firings continue.

Obama owes his gay and lesbian supporters at least a timetable for action. Equal rights for gays and lesbians demand more than outreach to opposing views. They also demand leadership, commitment and the spending of some political capital.

As Obama's predecessor used to say, the president is "the decider."

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage cpage@tribune.com