Adapted from a talk given at a Party for Socialism and Liberation branch meeting in San Francisco, Oct. 22.
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I want to talk about what may be the beginning of the end for the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bans openly gay or lesbian people from serving in the U.S. military.
On Oct. 12, Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction halting the implementation of DADT. On Oct. 20, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Justice Department a stay of Phillips’ ruling declaring DADT unconstitutional. So for eight days, the policy was on hold, and technically at least, the U.S. military was accepting the enlistment of openly gay service members. The group that filed the lawsuit, Log Cabin Republicans, has until Oct. 25 to file an appeal of the stay.
In another recent legal challenge to DADT, a federal judge last month in Tacoma, Wash., ruled that a nurse discharged from the Air Force for being gay should get her job back.
While there is nothing progressive about the imperialist military, anything that challenges and changes its racist, sexist and anti-LGBT policies is good. As communists we are for the total dismantling of the Pentagon and the closing of the hundreds of bases in dozens of countries around the world and here in the United States. There is no contradiction between working to do that and demanding an end to the discriminatory practices against lesbian and gay people in the military.
The issue has received national attention as the result of a court ruling by federal Judge Phillips, who on Oct. 12 issued an immediate injunction on the policy.
The DADT policy was a statement that LGBT people are not entitled to the same rights and protection as straight people while serving in the military. The message to society in general and the troops in particular is that there must be something wrong with a group of people if you can, as a policy, deny equal rights and benefits. While many of the LGBT service personnel may have reactionary patriotic views or desires, that does not mean they should be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.
There is a historic parallel between today’s struggle to end DADT and the struggle to integrate the U.S. military during World War II. At the time the military was segregated, African American soldiers were given inferior equipment and training and put into high-risk situations. Barracks and other aspects of military life were separate and unequal.
For U.S. imperialism, the hypocrisy of calling on the nation to unite in the fight for democracy and against the racist and fascist Nazi regime while the U.S. maintained Jim Crow segregation in the military was an impediment to winning the war. Eisenhower began the integration of the army during WWII, and in 1948 Truman issued Executive Order 9981 formally ending the segregated military.
One of the parallels between the struggles against DADT and segregation in the military is that the struggle to end the ban reveals the deeply rooted nature of the bigotry behind the logic of the ban. In a Yahoo news story, Wendy Wright, a spokeswoman for a group called Concerned Women for America, said, “The judge ignored the evidence to impose her ill-informed and biased opinion on our military, endangering morale, health and security of our military at a time of war.”
That is quite a remarkable statement. If she is concerned about the health of the troops, she could demand an end to the wars. She could call a press conference about the epidemic of prostitution, drugs and sexually transmitted diseases around U.S. military bases.
The argument that gays are a security risk because they are vulnerable to extortion only has validity if being gay is deemed something negative and in need of being hidden. If gay soldiers can serve openly they cannot be pressured to reveal information under threat of being outed.
Comrades and friends, the U.S. military is a reactionary institution we want to see abolished. The fight to end formal discrimination against lesbian and gay service personnel only helps to expose its reactionary nature and calls into question its other genocidal and criminal components. While we fight to end the formal anti-gay policies of the imperialist military, we see it as part of the struggle to end the Pentagon and the whole rotten imperialist system itself.
