Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Might Something Actually Happen?

Posted Tuesday, May 25, 2010 by Emily Rutherford

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  • Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Might Something Actually Happen?
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SOURCE: Flickr / afagen

The White House and Congress are taking steps to start a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell".

After a lot of hemming and hawing and not-much-happening, it looks as if the White House and Congress may at last be taking steps to start a repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military’s discriminatory policy which bars LGBT people from serving. If that language sounds cautious, that’s because things are still moving pretty slowly, but the exciting thing is that, 18 months after President Obama named repeal of DADT as a campaign promise, things are happening at all.

The New York Times reported yesterday afternoon that the new deal on a repeal timeline would give the Pentagon until December to “[complete] a review of its readiness to deal with the changes,” which the White House would also have to sign off on; before even this can happen, the House and the Senate must find the votes to add a DADT repeal measure as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill. There’s reason to be cautiously optimistic about those votes, but they’re not in the bag yet, and it seems as if some of the moderate Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee will need to be convinced—though, Steve Benen predicts, Congress might vote on the amendment as early as Thursday. If it makes its way into the defense reauthorization act, the Pentagon and the White House will then be able to conduct their respective reviews; if these conclude satisfactorily, DADT will be history.

Naturally, this is a lot of “ifs,” and not the ringing condemnation of DADT that many LGBT activists had hoped to secure from the Democratic White House and Congress. The breakdown is predictable: establishment, moderate DC LGBT organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network support the compromise as a good set of first steps, while AMERICAblog+Gay)”>other activists argue that this compromise is still leaving the door open to the Pentagon to find that the military isn’t ready to repeal DADT in December. There is nothing in the current language that requires a repeal, which is an obvious loophole in the plan—though maybe (I would argue) a loophole that doesn’t necessarily deserve to be called “bogus attempt at pacifying our community,” as one relatively new, post-2008 queer activist group would have it. This group, Queer Rising, is one of a few which has gained traction in the LGBT activist communities in the wake of skepticism about Obama’s commitment to LGBT rights following the 2008 election, and part of a trend that argues that cautious overtures like this motion towards DADT repeal are not an expression of support for the LGBT community.

However, it’s worth noting two things in response: one is that organizations which advocate specifically for LGBT servicemembers are behind this deal; another is that the military is a fundamentally conservative institution which may need to be approached in a fundamentally conservative way. Allowing LGBT people to serve openly in the armed forces is in keeping with a moderately progressive LGBT rights agenda, not a radical queer one which ought, in order to call itself radical, be skeptical of all institutions and favor opting out over fighting for the right to be included in them. No one is asking radical queer organizations to support the military or queer people’s place within it, certainly—but when evaluating whether this current DADT compromise is a good thing, it may be better to listen to the evaluations of those who make a practice of dealing with slow-to-change and highly institutional institutions like the military and the legislative branch.

To make a long story short: This is more government motion in opposition to DADT then we’ve seen in the law’s 17-year history. It would be a mistake not to be cautiously optimistic, and an even greater mistake to work to undermine this progress if you support a repeal of DADT in the first place.

Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.

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