An update to this post from yesterday. Ran across this from Timothy Beauchamp at AmericaBlog Gay:
Color me one of the first gay veteran surprised that the leaked survey's findings were positive. I do NOT mind and am actually excited about being wrong on this one. The indirect pressure that I thought would have been placed on troops to answer questions in the negative was an overestimation. Especially dismaying was the way the questions were worded and the use of the term "homosexual" to describe gay troops. Well, according to anonymous sources, the results of the survey are in our favor!
Being the trusting individual I am, I suspect an end-run around the brass on this, maybe an attempt to forestall them massaging the results. You will remember that this is the same Pentagon that commissioned a study from Rand Corporation in 1993 on this same issue, and then suppressed it when they didn't like the results. This is also the same Pentagon that lobbied fiercely for the imposition of DADT in the first place. (Not all the same people, obviously, but the same attitudes.) Gates and Mullen can sit in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and testify that they favor repeal, and maybe they actually do, but let's face it -- the president's stated policy position is repeal. What else are they going to say? In the meantime, the opponents of repeal, including a large number of senior officers, are stalling like crazy. You can tell this is hitting a nerve simply by the fact that they decided these surveys were necessary -- of the now 26 other countries that have adopted open service policies, not one of them polled the troops to see how they felt about it. They announced the policy and then implemented it. (I understand that Britain made the change in a month.) We, for some reason, have got to fart around on it because -- our officers can't control their troops? Hah?
At the very least, taken in context I think this points to a major division of opinion within the Pentagon. I suspect that they're banking on the "compromise" language (known in chez moi as the "sell-out language", and why was Winnie Stachelberg involved, anyway?) to torpedo the whole thing.
And it's sort of appalling that I've developed such a jaundiced view of this administration that I can even consider that.
2 comments:
It still astounds me that the US armed forces can be so timid when many other advanced countries have shown that it's no big deal. Britain, Holland, Germany, etc, etc. 26 countries can do it And the heavens haven't fallen. Yet the mighty US army and airforce and navy, filled with brave soldiers ready to die for their country, are also terrified of sharing quarters with known gays. (They're very comfortable with unknown gays).
Tcha!
It's the Pentagon brass, who make banana republic military juntas look like hippies. The ranks could care less.
They've been stalling, hoping, no doubt, for exactly what happened in Tuesday's elections: a Republican House that's going to make legislative repeal impossible. The present bill is not going to make it through the Senate in the lame duck, and after that, it's up to the courts, which is going to be chancy.
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