Gays in the Military: 50 Years of Stonewalling

leonardmatlovich.com

The Department of Defense has known for more than 50 years that gays make just as good troops as straights - don't let anyone tell you different.  They have known it all this long time, and just refused to budge on the issue.

Shauna Miller reports on a review by Col. Om Prakash of the Pentagon's own assessments of gay servicemembers, undertaken over a half century:

The Navy's 1957 Crittenden Report found "no factual data" to support the idea that they posed a greater security risk than heterosexual personnel. Straight officers boasting secrets due to "feelings of inadequacy" were a realer threat, it found. Despite these findings, the report recommended no changes to dismissal policies, for a reason that would define the department's stance on open service into the 21st century: "The service should not move ahead of civilian society nor attempt to set substantially different standards in attitude or action with respect to homosexual offenders."

In 1988, the Defense Personnel Security Research Center - a DoD agency - conducted its own study on gay soldiers to determine whether their service under current policies created security risks, for instance in terms of blackmail. It also discussed, based on the military and wider social data available, whether the military's policies were sustainable. The study returned again and again to the facts of conduct: "Studies of homosexual veterans make clear that having a same gender or an opposite-gender orientation is unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left or right-handed."

The study also owned the lessons of racial integration: "The intensity of prejudice against homosexuals may be of the same order as the prejudice against blacks in 1948, when the military was ordered to integrate," it found. "The order to integrate blacks was first met with stout resistance by traditionalists in the military establishment. Dire consequences were predicted for maintaining discipline, building group morale, and achieving military organizational goals. None of these predictions of doom has come true."

Miller quotes Kevin Nix of SLDN on the slow, top-down approach to military change: 

"The military doesn't exist in a vacuum from the rest of American culture," he says. "There is a generational divide. The newest generation and the next generation of military leadership are much more open and tolerant ... and that is helping the top-down process."