LITTLE ROCK — ONCE AGAIN fearful politicians, this time in the U.S. Senate, have shied away from doing the right thing in favor of, well, not doing much of anything about a continuing source of confusion and contention.
The Senate had an opportunity this past week to rectify a long-standing injustice, and allow homosexuals to serve in the U.S. military openly and honorably, instead of having to live a lie. Whether by pretending to be something they’re not-straight-or keeping their mouths shut. Either way, the official policy (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) treats homosexuality as a shameful secret instead of the fact of life it is.
Whatever its evasive wording, the message this policy sends is clear enough: Volunteer to serve your country, and, if you’re different from the rest of us where sexuality is concerned, you’ll be humiliated. It’s a message worthy of a schoolyard bully, only it’s being sent by the U.S. Senate.
Instead of voting to end this ongoing charade, the senators decided to . . . delay. Even though everybody knows what justice delayed is: justice denied. Once again. Tuesday’s vote in the Senate was a profile in something other than courage in the face of prejudice-and election-year jitters.
Some of the senators, like the always shifting Blanche Lincoln, said they were in favor of repealing the policy in principle. But not for the first time, she found a variety of excuses not to do the principled thing. Somebody ought to tell the lady that not practicing one’s principles is no better than having no principles at all. Maybe the voters of Arkansas will send her that message someday, like November 2nd.
The state’s junior senator, Mark Pryor, followed Miss Blank’s wobbly lead and voted to keep Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, too. When push comes to vote, neither of these “leaders” can be relied on, at least when it comes to taking a stand against the popular prejudice du jour. On sad occasions like this, it occurs to us that both may value public office too much to be trusted with it.
ONE DAY both these Honorables-that’s a noun of address, not a description-will look back on this vote and make unconvincing excuses for it. Much the same way they found excuses to kill the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the appellate bench years ago. They never even let his name get to the floor of the Senate, and so American jurisprudence was denied the services of the most promising legal mind since Arkansas’ own Richard Arnold. Both our senators were full of excuses for that display of sheer, partisan prejudice, too.
Now they’ve helped stall a long overdue-and inevitable-measure of simple justice. For it’s only a only a matter of time before homosexuals are allowed to serve their country in uniform like everybody else, without shame or evasion. Yet both of Arkansas’ senators voted with the aginners. With the result that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is still official government policy.
Why? The usual excuses were rolled out, and they were as unconvincing as ever:
More debate is necessary.
The question needs more study.
The Defense Department needs to conduct still another review.
As if this question hadn’t been debated, studied, and reviewed for-how long now, 10, 20 years? It was in 1993 that Bill Clinton, that master of equivocation, struck this strange compromise between just doing right and appeasing popular prejudice. As commander-inchief, he was more a negotiator-in-chief,triangulating even when it came to a basic issue of principle. What a contrast with a real commander-in-chief like Harry Truman, who simply issued an executive order abolishing racial discrimination in the armed forces of the United States and told his generals to work out the details. They did. But this issue has been kept alive for divisive decades by politicians who refuse to make a simple, straightforward decision.
The strangest excuse for the Senate’s inaction last week was that this bill already had too many riders attached. That excuse can be exposed in just a few words, and Michigan’s Carl Levin, now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, uttered them: “One can argue that there are provisions in this bill which should not be in this bill. Fine. Debate them. Vote on them.” Instead, a willful minority of the Senate couldn’t be bothered to do the right thing. The bill fell four votes short of the magic number-60-that’s needed to get a proposal to the floor for a vote on its substance.
Result: Those waiting for justice are told to wait still longer. They’re told the time isn’t right yet. As if there were a wrong time to do right. This divisive issue should have been put behind all of us years ago, yet it remains unresolved-a recurring disservice both to those discriminated against and the military as a whole, which has more pressing matters to attend to than hunting down homosexuals.
UNDER the current policy, homosexuals are treated neither as full citizens nor as automatic rejects for military service. They’re somewhere in between, always under a cloud, not daring to tell the truth lest it cost them their careers.
This is the opposite of what military honor should demand. Every junior officer is told to always tell the truth, however inconvenient or embarrassing or incriminating. Doing anything less could put the mission at risk, not to mention the lives of those under his command. But in this case members of the military are told to evade the truth. Dishonor, thy name is Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Quite apart from this policy’s being inconsistent with the military’s code of honor, treating a soldier’s sexuality as a shameful secret can prove mighty expensive. Take it from a senator with an independent streak-Joe Lieberman. He was Al Gore’s running mate in the presidential election of 2000-remember? By 2008, he was backing John McCain, the Republican candidate for president. His official designation in the Senate is Independent Democrat, and he remains as independent as ever. And as forthright. He reminded his colleagues last week that since DADT-an abbreviation as awkward as the policy it stands for-was adopted, $6 milion has been spent training some 14,000 members of the armed services who had to be discharged after their sexuality became known. That’s the equivalent of an entire division we’ve lost. At a time when the country needs all the troops it can recruit.
And that’s only a small part of the how much this idiocy is costing the taxpayers. A few years back (2006), a study commission led by a former secretary of defense-William Perry-found that each of those discharges costs the taxpayers an average of $42,835 to pursue. Last time we checked, the running total for all those discharges was $600 million. Idiotic is an understatement when it comes to describing this (non) policy. Whether you reckon the cost in honor or just dollars, injustice can be mighty expensive.
Editorial, Pages 84 on 09/26/2010