Army Secretary John McHugh said this week that he considers changes to the don’t ask don’t tell policy to represent a “de facto moratorium” on discharging gay soldiers, adding that he wouldn’t move to discharge soldiers who told him they were gay or lesbian.
Today, he backtracked on that statement:
Reversing course, Army Secretary John McHugh warned soldiers Thursday that they still can be discharged for acknowledging they are gay, saying he misspoke earlier this week when he suggested the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy had been temporarily suspended […]
“Until Congress repeals ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ it remains the law of the land and the Department of the Army and I will fulfill our obligation to uphold it,” McHugh said in a statement Thursday.
Earlier in the week, when pressed by reporters, McHugh said he wouldn’t try to discharge service members who in private conversations with him acknowledged being gay. He also said he believed that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had placed a moratorium on dismissals while the Pentagon surveyed troops on their opinions.
On Thursday, McHugh said he misspoke.
“There is no moratorium of the law and neither (Gates) nor I would support one,” McHugh said.
The key piece here is actually that Gates and McHugh wouldn’t support a moratorium, presumably not even one imposed by Congress. In that case, his words show the urgency of a full repeal, this year, of the policy. Because no matter how sensitively it gets applied, the fear still hangs over the head of any gay or lesbian service member, a fear that they will be discharged for who they are. And that policy, essentially labeled immoral by the Defense Secretary, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President, has to stop.
Getting back to the change in implementation, it is clear from McHugh’s earlier statements and this story that the military is willing to overlook the policy.
Lt. Robin R. Chaurasiya wasn’t exactly asked, but she told anyway: She is a lesbian, and in a civil union with another woman.
Her commander at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, Lt. Gen. Robert R. Allardice, could have discharged her under the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Instead, he determined in February that she should remain in the Air Force because she acknowledged her sexual orientation for the purpose of “avoiding and terminating military service.”
Chaurasiya says that is not true. But the general’s reasoning has the flavor of a Catch-22: If you admit to being homosexual you can be discharged from the military, but if you admit it for the purposes of being discharged you won’t be […]
At the very least, said Nathaniel Frank, an expert on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Chaurasiya case appears to turn the rationale behind the gay ban on its head.
“If commanders are ignoring or rejecting credible evidence of homosexuality because of the alleged motive of the person who makes the statement, the bottom line is they are keeping gay people in the service,” said Frank, a senior research fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s Palm Center. “That gives the lie that known gay people undercut the military.”
And it further cements the fact that the only reasons for perpetuating the ban on gay service members is political.
