By Monitor staff
.Mary Lou Paquette's desire to serve her country in uniform was so strong that for 28 years she was willing to hide who she was in order to do so. Paquette, the subject of a recent story by the Monitor's Meg Heckman, was unable to hide her homosexuality any longer and retired from the National Guard last summer.

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked Congress to end the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which allows gays to serve in the military as long as they don't do so openly. Congress should certainly do so. The policy is antiquated, hypocritical, discriminatory and wrong.

A Pentagon survey returned by 170,000 troops and military spouses had found that 70 percent of them believe that repealing the law would have a positive effect on the military or no effect at all, Gates said.

The armed forces don't set policy by referendum. But the survey's results suggest that, save for sectors of strong resistance in the Marines and some combat outfits, making the transition to a military that no longer discriminates based on sexual orientation should not be inordinately difficult.

As Paquette pointed out, gays have always served in the military. "It's silly to have a law when everybody knows there are gays. The young people now are so much more accepting. They don't see anything wrong with it," she told Heckman.

Earlier this year, the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute estimated that 66,000 gay, lesbian and bisexual people are serving in the military. Allowing them to do so openly, as 22 nations with troops in Iraq already do, should not compromise the military's effectiveness.

If Congress doesn't act, the courts almost certainly will, Gates said. One lower court judge has already ruled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" unconstitutional. The decision was stayed while an appeals court studied it, but the appeals court, and future courts, will find it illegal to discriminate based on sexual preference, because it is.

It will be far less disruptive and divisive if lawmakers, not judges, shepherd in the historic end to discrimination. Even in the Marines and in units where opposition is strongest, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will end with a whimper, not a bang. When combat troops who said they had served with someone they knew to be gay or lesbian were asked, 89 percent of Army units and 84 percent of Marine combat units said they had good or neutral experience working with gays.

If Congress repeals "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" before its Christmas recess, as we strongly hope it will, countless soldiers and veterans will join Paquette in celebrating another step in the march toward full equality for all. Among them will be Rev. Robert Wood of Concord, a decorated combat veteran of World War II. The bullet that found Wood's chest didn't know that it hit a gay man. And the enemies who felt the blast of his grenade didn't know that a gay soldier had thrown it.

The nation's 17-year-old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was always demeaning and wrong, though perhaps marginally justifiable as a transitional step toward greater equality. But it is unconstitutional, and Congress should repeal it.
Tagged: PoliticsCongress/Legislature/ParliamentDefencenational governmentNew HampshireMonitor editorialsDon't AskDon't TellGatesPaquetteWoodEmailComments (2)SharePrintComments
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I Wonder
By Jirdex77 - 12/01/2010 - 12:33 pm
if the CM author of this editorial and quilteresq everserved in the military? It's prety easy to make these idealistic la-la-land pronouncements if you have no experience with the situation and environment.

The strongest objections come from the front line combat troops - Army and Marine - for whom unit cohesion is paramount to survival and victory. Just telling them to "get over it" and expecting there to be no consequences on the unit is pretty naive and stupid. (I wonder what the responses were from the submariners.)

There should at least be a period for "indoctrination" and "sensitivity training" and all that stuff before just forcing this on the people who fight and die on the front lines.