Leave No Man's Behind

"Another thing when I'm president? If you're in the army, the navy, any branch of the armed forces... you can fuck whoever you want!"
-Denis Leary, "Lock 'N Load"

I've been sitting at my desk for a few hours now, and in between working I've been reading and thinking about the whole Don't Ask Don't Tell policy in the U.S. military.

Obama has been vocally opposed to the DADT policy, saying it's unconstitutional, and some federal court judges have backed him up on that. In a bizarre twist of WTF, the Department of Justice has appealed to have it reinstated, saying it's duty bound to defend the laws so long as there's an argument to be made. Or something to that effect.

Honestly, I've been reading stories about this all morning, and the amount of back and forth political and judicial mumbo-jumbo has my head spinning. The actual question of discrimination and truth and personal rights seems to be buried under the question of who can appeal what, who should be appealing what and for which reason, and who is simply pulling some crazy political angle. I'm dizzy.

I debated even wading into this quagmire because my understanding of the American judicial system is squat. And I'm not American. Nor am I in the military. Or gay. I'm pretty much the antithesis of who should be voicing an opinion on this matter. Which brings me nicely to a point that struck me amid all this back and forth. I haven't read every single news story available, but the major ones that I have read seem to have expert comments from judges, policy experts, military experts, high ranking military officials... but no actively serving gay military personnel. (Author's Note: for the sake of brevity, I'm going to use the term gay from here on out, but mentally add in lesbian, transgendered, bisexual in there. It's just easier and more sentence friendly than typing LGBT everytime.)

With the exception of Dan Choi, who's received some publicity for being booted out in July for being gay and subsequently trying to reinlist recently amid all this policy hooplah, the majority of "It works, don't change it" comments are coming from serving military personnel who are not gay. Although, to play devil's advocate to myself, maybe they are but won't say anything because they'll get kicked out. Or stabbed in their sleep.

The arguments in favour of keeping the DADT policy in place seem to be largely centered around the dire warnings of "enormous consequences" for the military and morale. The BBC reported last week that: "the Pentagon has been studying how gay people can be integrated into the US military and is to report on its findings on 1 December." Which seems on the strange side since gay people do not need to be integrated, given that they are already there. Seems it would be a better use of time and resources to instead work on integrated the bigoted masses towards an equal human rights military. Military gay people obviously don't have a problem being in the military, except when other people have a problem with them being there.

It's such an awkward law that the military cannot legally ask someone their orientation, but if it is found out they can happily expel you for it. To use a simplistic analogy, imagine that there was a race of people who had giant birth marks. You can't ask someone to take off their shirt and prove they aren't a Birthmarker, but if you catch someone with it you can expel them from serving their country. The futile senselessness of it makes me want to scream.

In Canada, it's been A-OK to be gay in the military since 1992. So 18 years later, and our military hasn't broken down into an un-cohesive blog of useless... at least not due to sexual orientation, but that's another story.

In my back pocket here, I managed to dig up a study conducted by the Palm Center, a research institute based out of California, entitled "Effects of the 1992 Lifting of Restrictions on Gay and Lesbian Service in the Canadian Forces; Appraising the Evidence".

Seems like amid all this current Don't Ask Don't Tell debate, someone should be bringing this study up as a shining example that the sky will not fall down if gays are allowed to openly serve their country. I'll polish this off with their key findings, and let you know decide on your own.

• Lifting of restrictions on gay and lesbian service in the Canadian Forces has not led to any change in military performance, unit cohesion, or discipline.
• Self-identified gay, lesbian, and transsexual members of the Canadian Forces contacted for the study describe good working relationships with peers.
• The percent of military women who experienced sexual harassment dropped 46% after the ban was lifted. While there were several reasons why harassment declined, one factor was that after the ban was lifted women were free to report assaults without fear that they would be accused of being a lesbian.
• Before Canada lifted its gay ban, a 1985 survey of 6,500 male soldiers found that 62% said that they would refuse to share showers, undress or sleep in the same room as a gay soldier. After the ban was lifted, follow-up studies found no increase in disciplinary, performance, recruitment, sexual misconduct, or resignation problems.
• None of the 905 assault cases in the Canadian Forces from November, 1992 (when the ban was lifted) until August, 1995 involved gay bashing or could be attributed to the sexual orientation of one of the parties.