Dan Choi was a career army officer, a combat veteran, a fluent Arabic speaker. In March, he announced he was gay, and in May, he was discharged.
“When I got the letter, I was extremely angry,” he told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. “The letter is basically saying bottom line, Lt. Dan Choi, you’re fired. You’re a West Point graduate; you’re fired. You’re an Arabic linguist; you’re fired. You deployed to Iraq, you’re willing to deploy again, doesn’t matter. Because you’re gay, that’s enough grounds to kick you out.”
Under current law, sexual preference IS enough to kick him out. That’s why the law should be changed.
In 1993, President Clinton signed legislation establishing the current “don’t ask, don’t tell” standard. Gays can only serve if they don’t have sex or talk about their orientation. Since then, about 13,000 homosexuals have been expelled from the military, more than 250 since President Obama took office.
The rationale for the policy was that national security demanded it. As the legislation put it, allowing gays to serve openly “would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”
Today, that rationale has been turned on its head. The national interest requires that gays be included, not excluded, from the armed forces.
Start with obvious cases like Dan Choi. Arabic speakers – particularly those with on-the-ground experience in Muslim countries – are invaluable and irreplaceable. America cannot afford to lose any of them, especially when forces are stretched so thin that troops are compelled to serve repeated combat tours.
The country also cannot afford to lose dedicated soldiers like Lt. Sandy Tsao, who decided last January to tell her superiors she was gay. In a letter to the newly elected president, she urged him to repeal the current policy: “We have the best military in the world, and I would like to continue to be part of it. My mother can tell you it is my dream to serve our country. I have fought and overcome many battles to arrive at the point I am today. This is the only battle I fear I may lose.”
But is there a price to pay if gay soldiers like Choi and Tsao are retained? Do they pose an “unacceptable risk” to morale and discipline? The answer is clearly no.
