Rick Raw: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Passed House–Repeal Faces Gaggle of Republican Bigots in Senate

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

The convoluted journey to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) law finally passed the House by 234 to 194 votes. Not surprisingly, Republicans overwhelmingly voted against it. They used the lame excuse that "some military leaders need more time to study how a change in the law could affect the lives and readiness of service members."

This delaying tactic is particularly absurd since gays already represent at least 10% of active duty service members in all ranks right up to generals. We know this because many of these low and high ranking servicemen and women have left military service rather than live their gay lifestyles closeted under DADT.

Indeed, these skilled leaders, combat veterans, and technical experts served proudly and never flaunted their sexual preference. Until they came out as gay, their commanders and ranking officers had no idea they were gay.

When these gay servicemen and women left because of DADT, the military lost their valuable service. Over 13,500 service personnel chose to come out as gay rather than serve under DADT. 1,000 of those people were in critical career fields.

Now the DADT repeal bill hits the floor of the Senate like a smart bomb, with ranking Republican bigots lining up to filibuster the bill, led by Senator John McCain. President Obama and leading

Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. had supported the repeal.

The United States military is the only armed services in the world that had such a shameful law as DADT. Even the famous French Foreign Legion takes gay soldiers into their ranks.

The DADT repeal still faces a major hurtle. The amendment was written so that the repeal would not go into effect until after the pentagon publishes the results of a survey on how service members and their families view the change, and until the President, the Defense Secretary, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify that the repeal will not affect the military’s ability to fight. Of course, the President and Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense have already backed the repeal.

Funny, the Joint Chiefs of Staff that have been fighting the repeal since it was announced. These old bigots don’t get it. There are so many misconceptions about gay military personnel, it borders on Machiavellian prejudice. Again, they serve now and no one has complained which makes this concern a devious strategy to derail the repeal.

President Truman didn’t ask for all these conditions when he wrote a presidential order to integrate the services in 1948. It wasn’t a cake walk. The various service commanders tried to circumvent the order by using loopholes, but by 1965, the services were fully integrated by African-Americans with every branch of the military recruiting black servicemen and women.

Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Pa, who served in the Iraq war, is the chief sponsor of the DADT repeal amendment. He said that when he was in Baghdad, "my teams did not care whether a fellow solider was straight or gay if they could fire their assault rifle or run a convoy down ambush alley and do their job so everyone would come home safely."

My guess is that the amendment will pass the Senate, despite the fierce opposition. But it will be dragged out months by this so called "survey," which could scuttle the amendment. President Obama should have written a presidential order and not given the Joint Chiefs of Staff any leeway to squash the amendment.

The slow moving repeal of DADT is another example of Obama’s lack of leadership.