Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Prepare Talking Points
On Sunday morning, national security adviser Jim Jones didn’t want to be asked about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. This past week, President Obama sent a handwritten letter to 2nd Lt. Sandy Tsao, who is leaving the Army after disclosing that she is a lesbian. Obama wrote Tsao, “It is because of outstanding Americans like you that I am committed to changing our current policy.”
On Sunday, Gen. Jones did his best to avoid saying anything about the administration’s policy, even to reiterate the President’s own pledge to Lt. Tsao:
JONES: So it’s a complicated issue. It will be teed up appropriately and it will be discussed in the way the president does things, which is be very deliberative, very thoughtful, seeking out all sides on the issue and trying to …
STEPHANOPOULOS: But if the president is against the policy, why not suspend prosecutions and investigations while that review continues?
JONES: Well, maybe that’s an option that eventually we’ll get to but we’re not there now…
…
JONES: We will have long discussions about this. It will be thoughtful. It will be deliberative. The president I know will reach out to fully understand both sides or all sides of the issue before he makes a decision.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But it will be overturned.
JONES: I don’t know. We’ll have to – the president has said that he is in favor of that. We’ll just wait – we’ll have to wait and see – as a result of the deliberations and as a result of the – in the months and weeks ahead. We have a lot on our plate right now. It has to be teed up at the right time so – to do this the right way.
When the President says he is committed to something, the national security adviser isn’t supposed to say “I don’t know.” Was Jones surprised to hear about Obama’s letter to Tsao? Did he think the White House had begun to back away from its commitment? Some opponents of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell have been critical of the White House’s efforts to quietly change its website in order to back away from Obama’s commitment.
So where do I stand on all of this? I’ve never served, so I don’t really know what enlisted troops think about this issue. But I’ve worked with troops and have always been impressed by their professionalism. My best guess is they won’t have a problem working with openly gay colleagues who are equally committed to the mission. As a matter of principle, that is the right way to go.
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5 Responses to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Prepare Talking Points”
Studies have been conducted on the “catching” phenomenon of sexual behavior [and therefore potentially new adopted fixation] in prisons. There have been compelling findings that under stressful conditions where same gendered people are crowded together…particularly moreso in tight quarters such as barracks common in some prisons, that homosexuals can provide an outlet to otherwise hetero inmates to vent their pent up stress and sexual frustration in same-sexed encounters.
Where do we find other conditions where stress is high, same genders crowded in tight conditions where homosexuals flaunting their availibility [implied by "coming out"] to their fellows in said conditions? Armed combat.
So..in order to avoid GIs coming back from active duty with their new same-gendered partners after going in to combat hetero, to their shocked midwestern families [flyover country provides the most new recruits], the military has adopted a wise strategy. Imagine how recruitment would drop off in conservative areas if the word got out that newly “outed” homosexuals provided the perfect outlet for same-gendered sexual encounters within these conditions amongst otherwise heterosexual recruits going in?
Not good. Go ahead and laugh. I'll provide the links to the prison studies and you can decide for yourselves..
************
“Total institutions are closed, single-sex
societies separated from society, socially and
physically. Inhabitants of total institutions
have essentially all decisions about the
structure and content of their daily lives made
for them, and they share all aspects of their
daily lives within these types of institutions…
…”Facility 2
had the worst sexual coercion climate of the
seven surveyed and postulated the primary
cause appeared to be the use of barrack style
housing, large prison inmate population size,
racial conflict, and lax security, demonstrating
that characteristics of the prison itself also plays
a significant factor
The social constructionist perspective of
the 1990’s however, began to identify more of the
complexities of sexual identity and sexuality within
prisons and examined such traits of how offenders
identified their own sexual identities and pre and
post-prison influences on sexual behavior…
..researcher kept an ongoing mail correspondence
with a group of 25 female offenders during their
times of incarceration. While the specific focus of
the study was related to sexual coercion, inmates
also provided the author with observations about
prison culture and daily life. Three themes were
culled from these letters: 1) a climate of apathy
regarding sexual coercion among inmates, 2)
sexual roles and persona’s adopted by inmates
related to sexual behavior and, 3) institutional
factors related to the incidence of coercion…
..Finally,
the inmates’ letters point out two important
institutional contributors to sexual coercion:1)
open dormitory-style housing..”
Source: http://www.wcsap.org/pdf/AdEdDigestMay05.pdf
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Crowding and stress in barrack-type environments of same gendered people, of which some are openly sexual to same gendered encounters have been demonstrated to lead to a coercive homosexual environment. Combat military conditions are often: crowded and stressful barrack-type environments of same-gendered people..
Ergo [I would conclude] the military's objection to homosexuals outing themselves. Don't get all worked up about it. The military always proceeds strategically. Strategically, allowing homosexuals to flaunt their sexuality in those conditions and possibly send home recruits that went in hetero and came out homo or at least bi-sexual would be a total disaster for recruitment potentials…potentials that are the lifeblood of the military.
Take their decision not as one of prejudice, but one of pure strategy. Would you expect less from the military?
Ah, leave it to to Silhouette to provide links to a study only tangentially related to the topic of a post. Thank you for your consistency.
I also like the breadth of coverage of research paradigms, drawing not only on traditional quantitative research, but also on more naturalistic, qualitative research. The problems with Sil's approach are based on the impossibility (and undesirability) of making causative or even correlative claims from qualitative research. Prison is not the same as military service, “flaunting” is not the same as “coming out,” and as always, animals involved in artificial insemination research are not the same as humans. Ergo, the connections she perceives are tenuous, and may be best understood as similes, rather than parallels.
When I watched Jim Jones' interview, I was struck by the number of times he avoided questions, not just about DADT. When asked if we thought Osama bin Laden was dead, he answered something like “We'll just keep going”. And there were several times were he answered to the effect of “you'll have to ask the president”. It made me wonder why this guy agreed to be interviewed, if he can't answer any policy questions on his own.
They're not tangental points where the military is concerned. Here's the gay perspective on any issue involving them: “all information that lends credence to an opposing stance for them is tangental, or utter nonsense” by definition.
You may be able to ram the gay agenda down the throats of civilians but the military is a bit more resiliant when it comes to information they know they can extrapolate to predict combat psychology..
Ah Sil, you're so funny. You make me giggle. A huge percentage of military personelle are gay, and they don't go in to relieve pent-up, er, “stress” of their hetero colleagues. It's kind of like you want to see their sexual acts as their most defining qualities. Or maybe you just want to see their sexual acts, how you seem to obsess over them in every post — kind of suspicious for a presumably hetero person.