Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

DADT OTWO (with minor updates)

Last week Defense Secretary Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen indicated strong support for a repeal of DADT.  Sec. Gates, to the consternation of some, said that the military would conduct an 11-month review that, as Rep. Barney Franks later stated, would dictate how (but not whether) DADT would be repealed.

In what may be the most recent salvo in the fight to repeal DADT, word comes today that Daniel Choi, the gay military rights advocate, is back doing regular drill duty (that one weekend a month thing).

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In a telephone interview Lt. Choi told The Advocate,

he felt welcomed back by his fellow guardsmen in his infantry unit.

“Initially, I sensed a feeling of territorialism,” he said. “They were like, ‘That’s right, he came back to us!'”

Lt. Choi was scheduled to appear at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Creating Change Conference, but a telephone call from his commander had him rejoining his unit instead.

It is not clear what precipitated Lt. Choi’s return, but Spencer Ackerman believes

relaxed enforcement of the policy is already in place.

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As many of you may be aware, this is personal for me. As someone who was discharged in the run-up to DADT for “admitting to being a homosexual”, I am intimately aware of the scars left behind when you are forced to hide very real and natural feelings. Lt. Choi has been much braver than I — most of my family still doesn’t know after all this time the exact nature of my discharge.  I had medical reasons as well, so that’s the story they get.

Others, though, have come forward to tell their stories.  Sen. Gillibrand decided, after a meeting with Lt. Choi, to highlight the difficulties LGBT servicemembers face under the current system.  She announced on Rachel’s show last week a website www.dadtstoryproject.com where servicemembers can tell their stories in their own words. Sen. Gillibrand also has a petition seeking to repeal DADT.

As someone whose military career was cut short by the bigotry of Congress and the President in the early 1990s, and as someone who believes it is past time to throw DADT into the trash heap of history, I applaud Lt. Choi for coming forward and for going back to his unit.  I applaud his commander and his unit for welcoming him back.  I applaud the Obama Administration for getting us to a place where Lt. Choi is allowed to serve openly as a gay servicemember. And I applaud our military leaders for heeding the wishes of their Commander in Chief and working to see DADT repealed.

While I am pleased with this turn of events, this does not mean we can let our guard down. I believe that we need to keep the pressure on our elected officials to see that DADT is repealed. I would urge all of us to contact our Congressional delegations. A handy link is here:  Rally Congress

It should also be noted that the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on DADT originally scheduled for this Thursday has been canceled and will be rescheduled later.  The apparent reason for the cancellation is inclement weather.  Something about a couple of inches of snow.

I hope Lt. Choi is just the first of many LGBT welcomed to active duty.

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A new Quinnipiac poll of 2,500 (is that a decent sample?) fouond that 66% call DADT “discrimination” and 57% think gays should be able to serve openly.  Not surprisingly, Republicans oppose the repeal 53-40%.  Independents back repeal 56-37.  Those most opposed to repeal?  Why, that would be evangelical Christians.  The article goes on to say that military families are split 48% for and 47% oppose repeal.  I am still looking to see if there is an ideological breakdown of these families.


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/ 16 Comments

16 comments

  1. hubiestubert

    It is no one’s damn business. And I wish that folks who are such ardent supporters of privacy and personal responsibility would remember that position covers people who don’t share your sexuality or religion.

    Don’t like it? Don’t eat it. But never mind what anyone else has on their plates. Worked when you were five, it works today.  

  2. Chris Blask

    F’in’ A soldier!!

    That’s awesome news.  For political purposes it is a good and wonderful thing, but for personal reasons it kicks ass.  I’ve been very impressed with you, Lt. Choi.

    Welcome home, and congratulations.

  3. DTOzone

    technically DADT is still law and by law he told and thus can’t serve.

    But I guess the hope is either no one will do it, or a court challenge will either set the stage for A.) momentum for a quick repeal or B.) declaring DADT unconstitutional.  

  4. GMFORD

    then they repeal it.  If a law makes no sense but is hard to overturn politically, sometimes they just stop enforcing it.

    Then someone says, “Why is this old law still on the books?  Nobody enforces it anymore.”

  5. Charles Lemos

    It’s a good moment.

    Watching the reaction on the right is something to behold.

    For Oliver North, it means NAMBLA is now mainstream.

    But what to make of the worries of the AFA’s Bryan Fischer:

    Gays showering with straights? Absolutely.

    If President Obama, congressional Democrats, and homosexual activists get their wish, your son or grandson may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals who may very well view them with sexual interest.

    Talk about creating a hostile work environment for people who practice normative sexuality!

    But that’s nothing, just last week, he suggest criminalizing homosexuals.

    As the Family Research Institute reports, historian Paul Johnson has written that decriminalizing homosexuality, which was done beginning in the 1960s for ill-conceived reasons of supposed compassion, has left us now today with a “monster in our midst” – a powerful, vicious, and punitive homosexual cabal that is determined to overthrow completely what remains of Judeo-Christian standards of sexual morality in the West.

    As he points out, the process took place in three stages. First, homosexual behavior was decriminalized, while still being regarded as a “great moral evil.” But decriminalization enabled homosexual activists to openly organize, until they pressed for and received declarations that not only was homosexual conduct not an evil, but was in fact the moral equivalent of heterosexuality.

    Then once this milestone was achieved, homosexual activists pressed beyond equality to privilege, where now today homosexual behavior has been given special protections in public life, protections which come at the expense of religious liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of association and lead to the punishment, intimidation and harassment of any who oppose their agenda.

    Paul Johnson, who is British and a rara avis in that he is an Anglo-Catholic (think Lady Marchmain from Brideshead Revisited), is certainly an eminent historian. One of many in the 1970s made the drift to the right. His Birth of Modernity is one of the major historical works written in the late 20th century. But Johnson, who became a Thatcherite, was also a champion of traditional family values who was long ago exposed as hypocrite. Though married, it came out that he had engaged in a 11 year affair. His mistress was the writer Gloria Stewart who decided to go public with the after tiring of Johnson’s hypocrisy over his moralizing crusade in the Times and Daily Telegraph. It turns out that Johnson like to be spanked and told that he was a naughty boy when engaging in extra-marital sex. Hardly a paragon of moral virtue.

  6. Charles Lemos

    When I think of Paul Johnson, I think of this episode of the British situation comedy, The New Statesman that parodied the Tories:

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