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SCOTUS Turns Down Challenge to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

Posted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in At TMV.
Jun 8th, 2009 | Comments

Bloomberg:

The rebuff spares President Barack Obama’s administration from the awkward task of mounting a legal defense for a policy the president says should be repealed. In urging the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal, administration lawyers said a lower court was correct to uphold the policy.

The high court case stemmed from a lawsuit by 12 former service members who were discharged because of their sexual orientation. A federal appeals court in Boston threw out the suit, disagreeing with a San Francisco-based appeals court that had let a similar suit go forward.

RELATED — Gallup last week, Conservatives Shift in Favor of Openly Gay Service Members:

Americans are six percentage points more likely than they were four years ago to favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military, 69% to 63%. While liberals and Democrats remain the most supportive, the biggest increase in support has been among conservatives and weekly churchgoers — up 12 and 11 percentage points, respectively.

And back in May, in The Wall Street Journal of all places, an op-ed by Brian Hughes who served as a sergeant in the Army Rangers and was awarded the Commendation Medal twice for his service. Calling for the repeal of DADT Hughes writes:

Several of my colleagues knew I was gay. We lived in the closest possible conditions. When there were showers, we showered together. When we were out overnight on the cold, bare mountains of Afghanistan, we slept huddled together for warmth. It should go without saying that there was nothing remotely sexual about these situations. We had uncomfortable experiences — we were at war, after all — but my buddies were never uncomfortable with me.

He blames the Dems:

Today the strongest resistance to overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may not come from the military, which polls show mostly supports repeal, nor from social conservatives, who are not in power. Rather, there are many Democratic leaders and strategists who blame the issue of gays in the military for damaging the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency. They fear it could have the same effect on Mr. Obama.

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Silhouette

What people do in privacy is their business, as long as they are consenting adults. "Coming out" is a form of advertising. Nobody needs to know about a gay person's private fetish. Telling the world is a form of fishing, of increasing one's chances of "getting lucky".

I can see how this behavior would be a distraction in same-gendered units at war. A distraction that the homosexual himself was hoping for??

Lynx

Sil, I continue to be astonished by the sheer level of your baseless and hateful bigotry. So patriotic hardworking Americans who casually say that they have a boyfriend or girlfriend and happen to share that persons gender are "advertising" sex? So this means that Obama is advertising the hetero sex he has with his wife whenever he mentions her existence?

The data is not on your side Sil. Even if data showing homosexuality, like religion, was a choice (and it's not), there is no evidence that people like Dan Choi could harm the US military simply by being more honest about their "preference" (known in civilized circles as their orientation), any more than females entering the military, or blacks integrating the military did.

But more than that, and what allows me to stay calm in the face of such positions, is that history is not on your side. Equality and acceptance is rising year by year for GLBT people. There is no indication whatsoever that this trend is stopping and quite a bit that it is slowly accelerating. It'll take some time, but I'm entirely certain that full equality is a matter of when, not if. In one more generation, treating GLBT people as perverts or mentally ill will be as generally rejected and socially unacceptable as racism.

roro80

DADT really is a policy whose time has passed. It's a pretty poorly kept secret that there is a large gay population in the military -- larger than there is in the general public, by most accounts -- and it certainly does very little to "unit cohesion" or whatever the general argument is. While there are individuals in the miliary ranks that are certainly homophobic, there are also soldiers/officers who wouldn't normally befriend a black person, or a Jew, for example, but while these issues may (and I'm sure do) cause tention at first, a competent soldier is a competent soldier, and respect and cohesion grows within units despite race and religion. I imagine that this will happen -- and certainly already does -- despite sexual preference.

I think it's going to be interesting to see how allowing out gay people in the military will mesh with new marriage laws. With the current policy, if a gay couple gets married in a state where it's legal, and they, for example, announce it in the paper, that's grounds for discharge. Once/if DADT comes off the books, it will be interesting to see the development of policies surrounding things like military housing of spouses, spousal benefits, etc. For example: what if a member of the armed forces who is gay and married gets transferred to a training area in a state where gay marriage is not recognized? Will that affect the ability of the spouse to receive benefits and housing? Now, I don't think these things should keep the repeal of DADT from happening, it's just going to be an interesting thing to watch develop.

hyhybt

"Telling the world is a form of fishing, of increasing one's chances of "getting lucky"." And you feel the same way about straight people "coming out" as straight, i.e. not going out of their way to hide the fact that they like the opposite sex and may possibly even have a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse?

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