Part 1 of 2

April 2010 – If gay activists and their political allies have their way, the most lethal military in the world will become an experiment in social engineering.

In his January State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said, “This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

Obama was referring to a law passed by Congress in 1993, the last time a U.S. president tried to open the doors of the military to allow homosexuals to serve. Congress passed the measure after then-President Bill Clinton tried to use his executive power to accede to gay activists’ demands.

But Clinton ignored the intent of Congress by instituting the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT). While the law said gays and lesbians could not serve, Clinton’s enforcement policy was basically this: “When you enlist, the military won’t ask you if you’re a homosexual, and you are not to tell anyone if you are.” If homosexuals later came out of the closet, they could then be discharged.

DADT satisfied neither side of the debate. On the one hand, the policy – left in place by President George W. Bush – clearly tried to circumvent the intent of Congress by allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. On the other hand, gay activists felt that they were being treated like second-class citizens, having to serve as faithfully as heterosexuals while hiding their sexual orientation.

Now gay activists have a sympathetic president and a Democratically-controlled Congress that may, for the first time, have enough votes to repeal the ban.

Discharging the faithful?
Just how many gays and lesbians are secretly serving in the U.S. military is, of course, unknown. Activists constantly use the figure of 65,000, a number that arose from a hotly disputed report claiming 7% of the U.S population is homosexual. That erroneous percentage was then applied to Census Bureau statistics that tabulated the number of service members who lived in a household with a member of the same gender.

As supporters of the ban have argued, such an estimate cannot know if same-sex members of a household are homosexual or simply heterosexual roommates. In any case, how could anyone really know how many homosexuals are in the military if gays and lesbians are told not to publicly announce their sexual orientation?

Instead, activists and their allies frequently point to the numbers of homosexuals who are discharged, clearly indicating that at least some number of gays and lesbians are serving in the military. U.S. Air Force Colonel Om Prakash, who believes DADT should be repealed, said in a 2009 article he wrote for Joint Force Quarterly that, since 1994, the military has discharged nearly 12,500 service members under the policy.

That number is probably low, Prakash insists, “since it cannot capture the number of individuals who do not re-enlist or who choose to separate because of the intense personal betrayal they felt continuing to serve under the auspices of DADT.”

To those who favor lifting the ban, this process of discharging members of the military merely for their sexual orientation doesn’t make sense. Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer who teaches military history at Boston University, said, “With U.S. forces engaged in perpetual war, the Pentagon can ill-afford to treat otherwise able-bodied individuals as ineligible for military service.”

Not so fast, insists Elaine Donnelly, president of the center for military readiness (CMR), an independent, non-partisan public policy organization that specializes in military and social issues. In 2008 Donnelly testified before the House armed services committee Subcommittee on personnel, stating, “In comparison to discharges for other reasons, such as pregnancy or violations of weight standards, these numbers [of discharges for homosexuality] are relatively small.”

In fact, a 2007 CMR report, relying on figures provided to the General Accountability Office by the Department of Defense, said discharges on the basis of sexual orientation amounted to only 0.37% of discharges for all reasons between the years 1994 and 2003.

“During that 10-year period there were 59,098 discharges for drug offenses; 38,178 for serious offenses; 36,513 for violations of weight standards; 26,446 for pregnancy, 20,527 for parenthood, and 9,501 for homosexuality,” the report said.

Are these homosexuals who are being discharged the result of military witch hunts, as activists claim, with officers seeking out homosexual servicemen and women to persecute and drum out?

Donnelly says no. “Contrary to exaggerated claims by activist groups, more than 80% of homosexual service members discharged since the law was enacted left the service not because of witch hunts rooting them out but because of voluntary statements admitting homosexuality,” she told the committee.

Despite all this, homosexual activists argue that it is still a waste of money for the military to train people, discharge them for being gay, and then pay to train someone else to take their place.

But supporters of the ban respond that money is not the main concern when it comes to the military. After all, the military is forced to absorb similar costs when personnel are prematurely discharged for all of the reasons cited by the CMR report. In fact, those costs are simply part of the price that is paid for producing an effective military. Would it make sense to keep soldiers who are overweight or on drugs, for example, simply to keep from losing the money expended on training?

In any case, Donnelly argues that the cost could be avoided altogether – and discharges of homosexuals could be reduced to zero – if the Department of Defense simply followed the law passed in 1993.

“The issue is not ‘replacement cost,’” she told Congress. “It is the cost of recruiting and training individuals who are not eligible to serve in the military because they are homosexual.”

Equal rights with straights
However, the core argument for homosexual activists – on every agenda issue from same sex marriage to hate crime laws to workplace policies – is always the same: Homosexuality is the same as heterosexuality, and thus gays and lesbians must be treated the same as straights.

Repealing the ban on homosexuals serving in the military is no different. Activists and their sympathizers view the matter through the prism of equality.

During a February hearing on DADT before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Kay R. Hagan (D-NC) said the ban should be lifted because it was simply a “discriminatory practice.” She asked, “[I]s there any reason to believe that the dedication and professionalism of our leaders in uniform is based in any way upon their sexual orientation …?”

Prakash said the ban on open homosexuality highlighted the “gap between the traditional American creed of equality for all and the DADT law.”

While the argument over equality may be a legitimate battleground in the civilian sphere, however, the issue doesn’t apply to the DADT debate because no one has a right to serve in the military.

“The military is essential to our survival as a nation. It’s not a social experiment, and serving in it is not a right,” said culture analyst Frank Turek, founder and president of CrossExamined.org. “People have to qualify and then make sacrifices.”

Turek said that because the military is a unique institution, the usual arguments don’t necessarily apply.

“Military people must subordinate many of their individual rights to advance the national interest,” he said. “Recruits must agree to give up some of the freedoms that civilians enjoy, including certain sexual freedoms and even the freedom of speech! So even if homosexual behavior is permitted in society, that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be permitted in the military.”

Donnelly goes even further, however, and makes it clear that the issue of “rights” could become even more salient for Christians should activists succeed.

If the ban is lifted, she said, “Any military man or woman who expresses concerns about professed homosexuals in the military, for any reason, will be assumed ‘intolerant,’ and suspected of harassment, homophobia, ‘bullying,’ bigotry or worse. Since our military does not tolerate sexual harassment or bigotry, disciplinary penalties and career-ending denials of promotions would be the logical consequence of treating homosexuals in the military as a ‘civil rights’ issue.”

That means the endgame for gay activists could be the same in the military as it is everywhere else: the silencing of Christian opposition to homosexual ideology concerning human sexuality, marriage and family.

At that point, Christians in the military may find themselves on the other end of an entirely new mutation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”   

The issue of whether or not the presence of homosexuals in the military would impede efficiency and unit cohesion will be the subject of a follow-up article.