Out In The Montains : OP/ED - Time for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to Go

The secretary wanted an “assessment,” he said, “in order to evaluate the climate at representative military installations in each service with regard to our [don’t ask, don’t tell] policy on homosexual conduct.”

The secretary’s directive came in the wake of last July’s murder of an army private at Fort Campbell, Ky, where fellow service members of 21-year-old Barry Winchell bludgeoned him to death.

About two months ago, Mr. Cohen released the results of that survey, conducted at 38 bases and on 11 ships and submarines, from Jan. 24 through Feb. 11, 2000.

These results indicate serious problems in a pervasively hostile, anti-gay climate in all four branches of the armed forces ö the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps.

A whopping 80 percent – an overwhelming majority – of the more than 71,500 service members who were questioned reported hearing anti-gay remarks during 1999. Morever, 33 percent said they heard such remarks often or very often.

For the most part, junior personnel perpetuated the harassment against other junior enlisted service members. Nonetheless, 73 percent said that even when senior personnel witnessed such harassment, they did nothing to stop it.

What is even worse is this disturbing finding: 37 percent of those who participated in the survey said that they had either witnessed or seen harassment based on sexual orientation.

The Secretary of Defense said he was “surprised at the numbers” of service members who had witnessed some form of anti-gay harassment. “The incidents and use of abusive language are more widespread than I had anticipated,” he said, quoted in the Houston Chronicle.

One piece of good news from these disturbing, if not alarming, survey results is that after years of artful dogging and denial, Pentagon officials and the secretary are acknowledging that they have a serious, long-standing problem on their hands. Anti-gay remarks and harassment abound in the armed forces.

Why has it taken the military top brass so long to believe this reality? For more than six years the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, or SLDN, has been documenting all sorts of violations to don’t ask, don’t tell.

Earlier this month, for instance, SLDN published its sixth annual report, citing 968 incidents of anti-gay harassment during the past year, including assaults, death threats, and verbal gay-bashing. That’s up nearly 150 percent from the past year’s report of 400 incidents of harassment.

The Pentagon survey “simply corroborates what we’ve been telling them for the last six years,” said SLDN co-executive director Dixon Osborn, quoted in the New York Times.

“For six years the uniformed leaders have been missing in action when it comes to stopping anti-gay harassment,” SLDN co-executive director Michelle Benecke told the Houston Chronicle, explaining why the harassment has become such a serious problem.

“Ultimately, the key to stopping harassment and other violations of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ violence against gays in the military is leadership and accountability,” she said. “Unless they take immediate steps, someone else is going to get hurt.”

Don’t ask, don’t tell was supposed to make it easier for gays to serve in the armed forces, although gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals must keep private their sexual orientation and are not permitted to engage in homosexual acts. The policy, in fact, has made matters worse, with thousands of gay service members discharged in recent years.

Prior to and during the implementation of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” military officials have asserted that the presence of openly gay service members would undermine morale and unit cohesion.

Now, with the undeniable results of this survey, Defense Secretary Cohen is in the awkward, if not embarrassing position of having to admit that anti-gay harassment itself is what “seriously undermines the good order and discipline that is critical to an effective fighting force.”

But that’s only half of the story. At the very heart of anti-gay harassment is the don’t ask, don’t tell policy itself. “When you have a [policy] that treats an entire class of people as second-class citizens, it suggests that you can treat them that way,” Osborn told The New York Times.

Ultimately, the policy has to change. And what the country needs is the kind of change in policy that President Harry Truman brought about after World War II, when he fully integrated the military.

The Secretary of Defense ought to advocate this change now.

Chuck Colbert was a naval officer from 1981-85. He serves on the board of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.