Asking and Telling

The fight over DADT was always about the normalization
of homosexuality.

Gabriel Arana |
December 22, 2010 | web only
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=asking_and_telling

Today, the president will sign a bill repealing "don't
ask, don't tell," the 1993 law that bars gays from
serving openly in the military. Given the amount of
public support for allowing gay people to serve openly
(over two-thirds of Americans favor repeal), it had
largely become a question of when and how -- and not if
-- the law would be repealed. All except the most
committed opponents had abandoned arguing on the
merits; they quibbled about process, timing, and
implementation. On this issue, conservatives made clear
they were in what Focus on the Family's James Dobson
described as a cultural "holding pattern," trying to
delay the inevitable.

For all the sad stories of gay service members who've
been victims of this institutionalized discrimination,
the fight over DADT has been about more than just gays
in the military (who,  by some estimates, already make
up 2 percent of active service members). The true fight
has been about what it means to say, "I am gay" --
whether the affirmation is cause for social -- and in
the military, literal -- ostracism and exclusion or
whether it's a neutral means of describing yourself. As
with the fight over the term "marriage" -- which is
what was at stake in the Prop. 8 battle in California
-- the ability to say you're gay without reprisal is
really about the normalization of homosexuality.

As Judge Virginia Phillips noted in striking down the
law this past September, for all the talk about
"homosexual behavior" and the comfort of straight
soldiers, DADT was always primarily a restriction on
speech. Very few discharges involved a colleague or
superior walking in on someone in bed, or -- despite
the bizarre paranoia of some critics -- gay service
members molesting a colleague. (Of course existing
military codes already prohibit this sort of behavior,
but in the minds of "don't ask, don't tell" supporters,
DADT was the only thing protecting virginal straight
soldiers from rapacious homosexuals.) Most discharges
were carried out based on statements that demonstrated
one's "propensity" to engage in homosexual behavior,
chief among them a verbal admission of being gay. In a
sense, this is what made DADT such an abhorrent and
fundamental assault on individual freedom: Like being
forbidden to speak your own name, it denied gay people
the simple right to identify themselves. As queer
theorist Judith Butler pointed out in a well-known 1997
essay, the 1993 law was primarily concerned with giving
others extensive guidelines for determining who counts
as gay, "a homosexual is one whose definition is to be
left to others, one who is denied the act of self-
definition with respect to his or her sexuality, one
whose self-denial is a prerequisite for military
service."

To religious conservatives, allowing gay people to say
who they are is a dire threat to society and the
military. This week, Bryan Fischer of the American
Family Association argued that without "don't ask,
don't tell" in place, the U.S. military won't be able
to come to the rescue to all the other sissy armies:
"We will no longer be able to bail out these other
emasculated armies because ours will now be feminized
and neutered beyond repair." Similarly, Daniel Blomberg
from the Alliance Defense Fund warned that the
legislation put the religious freedom of troops and
military chaplains who disapprove of homosexuality in
"unprecedented jeopardy." Blomberg argues that even if
accusations of harassment or discrimination are
dismissed (or not pursued in the first place) military
members may still "avoid religious teachings on sexual
ethics to avoid being branded as a 'troublemaker' or
seen as 'not a team player.'"

Refuting these statements is easy. Not only have two
studies from the Department of Defense -- the first a
1993 RAND Corporation study the DoD paid $1.3 million
for -- concluded that allowing openly gay soldiers to
serve will have no appreciable effect on military
readiness, existing military regulations already
protect chaplains from performing duties that go
against their faith, and as with issues like abortion,
chaplains are permitted to speak their conscience
without retribution. The troops, too, are as free as
ever to hold and express anti-gay views.

But that's not what the fuss is really about. What
conservatives really fear aren't institutional
restrictions on religious liberty or laws targeting
hate speech, but rather anti-gay views becoming
socially unacceptable. That they see this as a form of
persecution is a testament to the cultural privilege
they've enjoyed for so long; only someone who has not
had their views subject to much scrutiny can be so
deluded as to imagine that "religious freedom" entails
freedom from criticism. And juxtaposed against the
courage it's taken for gay people to come out of the
closet -- even when faced with the very real threat of
violence, loss of employment, and social isolation --
this view seems pretty cowardly.

When the president signs the repeal of "don't ask,
don't tell" today, it will strip anti-gay prejudice of
the state's imprimatur, allowing culture to happen
where it usually does -- in the everyday interactions
between people who are very different, sometimes
radically so, but still call themselves Americans.
Allowing service members to know their gay colleagues
is so threatening to religious conservatives because,
as studies have shown, actually knowing a gay person is
the best predictor of how one views homosexuality. Once
service members can utter the words "I am gay" without
an official state sanction, the culture-war battle has
largely been won.



Gabriel Arana is the assistant web editor at The
American Prospect. His pieces have appeared in The
Nation, Slate, The Advocate, The Daily Beast, and other
publications. He also blogs regularly for Box Turtle
Bulletin, an LGBT news and analysis blog

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