Political Pragmatist | Pursuing a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy

Matt Virgile Columnist

“When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one.”

These are the words engraved on the tombstone of Sergeant Leonard Matlovich (1943-1988), a gay Vietnam veteran who was deemed unfit for military service when he revealed his sexual orientation in 1975, despite having served his country for 12 years. Even after he was discharged, he continued to receive threatening telephone calls and face bullets fired into his home.

Matlovich challenged the military’s ruling, and was successful in 1980 when a federal judge ordered the Air Force to reinstate him with back pay. However, he was released again just two months later after accepting a tax-free payment from the military, because he felt that he could not win a government appeal against the increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court. He was buried with full military honors in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. after he died of AIDS in 1988. Matlovich’s courage and sense of justice led him to become the first openly gay man to appear on the cover of Time magazine in 1975, and his legacy serves as an inspiration to the gay rights cause.

The outdated and bigoted practice of exclusion of gays from military service persists to this day. While the military has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” instituted in 1993 that forbids personnel from asking recruits about their sexual orientation, it still requires gay soldiers to conceal their identities or else be discharged. Sergeant Robert Stout, an Iraq veteran who was awarded the Purple Heart, has recently become the first gay soldier wounded in the war to publicly “come out,” and wish to stay in the military as an openly gay soldier. Despite having served for over a year as a combat engineer, Stout said that he expects to be discharged and possibly even jailed before his scheduled release date of May 31. Even with Stout’s claim that he has not encountered any trouble from fellow soldiers, recent media polls showing that over 60 percent of Americans support the right of gays to serve openly in the military, and an estimate by UCLA statistician Gary Gates shows that there are already 65,000 gay soldiers serving, the military insists on upholding this policy, often with absurd justifications such as that gays will lower troop morale.

The discrimination against gays occurs not just in the military, but in American society as a whole. It has been a moral outrage based on outright ignorance and distortions by conservative leaders. Until recent years, some states have completely outlawed any type of homosexual activity through anti-sodomy laws, including one in Texas that was overturned only two years ago. Pennsylvanian Senator Rick Santorum had the audacity to defend this law, claiming that he had no problem with homosexuality but only with “homosexual acts.” This is ridiculous. That’s like saying that you don’t have a problem with Jews, but you do have a problem with Jewish practices. Obviously, homosexual acts are part of the identity of gays, and it is absurd to expect that outlawing them will miraculously change their sexual preference.

Other politicians have compared homosexuality to pedophilia, bestiality, and incest, but extensive tests by the American Psychology Association have already disproved the notion that homosexuality is a form of twisted perversion. Their findings indicate that sexual orientation is shaped at an early age, it is not a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed, and that so-called “conversion therapies” that supposedly allow gays to become straight are poorly documented. Other studies on gay parents indicate that their children show no developmental differences from those raised by heterosexual parents in psychological or social adjustment. A parent’s sexual orientation does not dictate that of their children, and homosexuals are no more likely than heterosexuals to molest children. Despite these well-researched and documented findings, millions of Americans are either ignorant of them or else refuse to believe them: a CBS Poll from just last year showed that 43 percent still believe homosexuality to be a choice, while 41 percent do not.

During the 1993 controversy of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen correctly recognized it as “Another Kind of Closet” in which “The Pentagon would become a cousin of the Catholic Church: homosexuals will be tolerated as long as they don’t homosex.”

When will our nation abandon the narrow-minded, archaic notion that there is something morally wrong or abnormal about homosexuality? What is right and wrong is a matter of common sense, and homosexual actions clearly pose a threat to no one. Millions of our citizens are discriminated against daily based on what they do in the bedroom, which has no relevance to their personal qualities or impact on their moral judgment. There is nothing remotely disgraceful about having gays serve in the military or in any institution—rather, such institutions that exclude these people are disgraces unto themselves.