DADT Poised For Repeal?

The long-awaited Pentagon study on the consequences of repealing the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy is out (no pun intended), and the results are both a political bombshell and a practical non-event.  The study shows that a strong majority of military members and their spouses have no objections to open homosexuals in the military ranks.

The result is probably surprising to those who designed the study.  Including military spouses in the survey was a fairly transparent attempt to rig the results to exaggerate hostility towards homosexuals.  As a group, military spouses have no apparent special expertise in the logistical or practical problems of dealing with open service by homosexuals in the military.  Rather, they were probably included in the study because they were expected to share an anti-gay stereotype of homosexual predators hitting on their straight military spouse and react emotionally to that prospect.  It didn’t turn out that way at all.

That reality — that anti-gay stereotypes don’t carry the weight that they used to even among groups that might be predicted to share them — might well be the death knell for DADT.  While Congressional Republicans remain more or less unified in opposition to repealing the policy, they are on the defensive in a way that they were not when the last attempt to remove barriers to gay military members was made in 1993.  For example, where opponents of President Clinton’s abortive effort were able to push an argument that gay service members were a threat to unit cohesion in 1993, Senator McCain (leading the charge to retain DADT now) is forced to respond to allegations that the DADT policy is what is undermining military effectiveness by removing qualified service members.

In politics, when you are on defense like that you are usually losing, and the Pentagon’s study puts Republicans even more strongly on the defense.

Of course, there is a time problem.  Republicans are posed to take over Congress and, on the defense or not, they are unlikely to turn against social conservatives who want to maintain the anti-gay policy regardless of any Pentagon study.  But the study does build pressure for action by the lame-duck Democratic Congress to finally put DADT into the dustbin of U.S. military history.