Senator Bob Dole, the minority leader, called it “a de facto lifting of the ban and therefore a sham,” and Senator Dan Coats, Republican from Indiana, called the plan a “dangerous mistake.” Yet even Nunn’s aides acknowledged that the interim policy was essentially unchanged from the status quo, since being relegated to the standby reserves was little better than being sacked.65 Plus, refraining from asking about sexual orientation at accession made little practical difference, because for decades, gays and lesbians had entered the military by lying in answer to that question (or by answering truthfully because they didn’t yet identify as gay). The new rule could mean one less lie to a bureaucrat at the beginning of a career, but gays would still have to hide the truth from those who really mattered, their closest comrades, if the ban wasn’t lifted outright.
The compromise gave Nunn and Powell essentially everything they wanted. Senator Nunn had the president “in a vice,” recalled Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post. By the end of that agonizing week, the administration was asking Nunn what language he wanted in the compromise plan, which Nunn literally faxed to the White House. For the substance of the plan Nunn credited Powell. “Gen. Colin Powell,” he said, “chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has stated that in view of the unique conditions of military service, active and open homosexuality by members of the armed forces would have a very negative effect on military morale and discipline. I agree with Gen. Powell’s assessment.”66
4
Listening to Nunn: The Congressional
Hearings on Gay Service
WHEN NUNN CAME OUT against lifting the ban in 1992, he did it with the typical political savvy of a seasoned Capitol Hill veteran. He called for “comprehensive hearings.” He urged “caution.” He insisted the issue be “studied,” that nothing be done “overnight.” He said he wanted to “hear a lot more evidence” before any change was incorporated.1 All of it sounded eminently reasonable, except that those who knew how these things worked knew that Nunn would use the “study” period not to assess the evidence but to build an arsenal of weapons to defeat the effort to lift the ban.
Even a close confidante of Nunn’s acknowledged that he often formed positions based on quick judgments made before all the evidence was in.2 The so-called cooling-off period demanded by Nunn would be a time to seek out evidence for a position he had already reached. Studies would be buried when they didn’t support his views. Hearings would be stacked against Nunn’s political opponents. Time would be used not to learn, but to let opposition fester and grow.
Both Clinton and Nunn had publicly promised a thorough investigation of the matter, even though they had made clear that they already knew exactly what they planned to do. Was the study period, then, a joke? Were the hearings just a performance? “The funny part of the story,” recalled Tim McFeeley, then head of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the nation’s largest gay rights group, “is that we even argued over this for six months. The interesting part is that [Clinton] even kept hope alive for six months,” when it quickly became clear that the new president was already prepared—by January—to drastically water down his commitment. If Aspin did, indeed, leak his memo on purpose, this would be the reason: Conceding there was insufficient support in Congress to push the change through was a way of admitting defeat—and blaming it on others—without having to spend much effort on the fight while there still might be time to change minds. Indeed by March, the president was publicly entertaining a plan to create segregated fighting units for gays and straights, though some congressional staffers argued the purpose of this inflammatory proposal was simply to ward off enshrinement of the outright ban into law, leaving control in the hands of Clinton and the Department of Defense.3 Still, Clinton perhaps believed he could come out in July with something he could call a victory. Gay groups who worked tirelessly on the issue seemed to believe that Clinton remained genuine in his commitment to make it work.
Along with Nunn’s Senate hearings that spring, Clinton would direct Defense Secretary Les Aspin to oversee the six-month study period. Aspin would respond by commissioning two studies. One was to be conducted by the Military Working Group, the panel of generals and admirals who drew on the services of military insiders like Robert Maginnis and Melissa Wells-Petry. The other would be handled by the Rand Corporation, a global policy think tank created by military brass after World War II. That both groups had longstanding ties to the military did not give much comfort to gay rights groups, who increasingly felt cut out of the picture. But the Rand Corporation, which conducted the far more extensive and rigorous study of the topic, came up with a surprising result. In the end, Nunn’s Senate hearings were more of a performance than a fair and open inquiry. Their stunning drama helped shape the contours of the ultimate policy and provide a revealing window into the nation’s feelings about both the military and the place of sexuality in the larger culture.
BEGINNING ON MARCH 29, 1993, Nunn made good on his promise to hold hearings on gays in the military. The Senate Committee on Armed Services met at 9:30 A.M. at the Hart Senate Office Building. The twenty-two members sat at a wraparound table, with Chairman Nunn at the center and the press corps stooping, kneeling, crawling, and creeping alongside the table skirt. Facing the senators was a smaller, rectangular table where witnesses sat, selected by members of the committee, but only if approved by Nunn. Over eight days of hearings, spread across four months ending on July 22, men and women would sit at that table, first reading a prepared statement and then responding to questions.
On the first day of hearings, consistent with the strategy Nunn and Powell had deployed since 1992, the senator framed the discussion around military readiness: “Our primary focus and concern must be on the implications of any change in current policy on the effectiveness of our armed forces to carry out their mission to defend our nation.” But he also acknowledged that, for many people, this was “a moral issue, touching upon deeply held religious and philosophical beliefs,” and that for still others, it was a “civil rights issue involving the fair and equitable treatment of individuals with a particular sexual orientation.” He promised the hearings would be “fair, thorough and objective” and that every witness would be “treated with dignity and respect.”4
It soon became clear, however, that Nunn had strange definitions of both objectivity and respect. “When the interests of some individuals bear upon the cohesion and effectiveness of an institution upon which our national security depends,” he said, already hedging his bets, “we must, in my view, move very cautiously. This caution,” he added with a touch of defensiveness, “is not prejudice; it is prudence.” (His language was yet another eerie replay of the words used to justify racial segregation four decades earlier, when a Korean War commander said, “There is no question in my mind of the inherent difference in races. This is not racism—it is common sense and understanding.”5)
There was no evidence that the “interests” of gays and lesbians—the wish to be treated just like everybody else—had any bearing upon the effectiveness of the military. But Nunn set up the hearings as though that assertion were a fact. He seemed to fully embrace the idea—promulgated by the religious right— that the fight for gay equality was another instance of inherently self-centered homosexuals putting their own interests above the common good. As he would say on television later that spring, “You can’t put individual rights above the mission. . . . If you don’t put the mission first, we’re going to lose an awful lot of young people.” The implication was that letting gays serve would so demoralize the ranks that they would lose wars and American lives—all to acquiesce to the selfish demands of a dangerous and despised minority.6
The first testimony was given by David Burrelli, a sociologist at the Congressional Research Service. Nunn explained that the responsibility of the CRS was to “provide Congress with neutral and objective research without bias.” But Burrelli’s discussion of gay service, which raised the question of what caused homosexuality, right there alongside
mention of “asexuality, fetishes, and other paraphilias,” reflected a pathologizing orientation toward homosexuality. After all, no CRS expert was ever called into Senate hearings to explain the “causes” of heterosexuality, as part of a discussion of toe-sucking and telephone scatalogia. Burrelli acknowledged that the homosexual exclusion policy was a form of discrimination but said that the military also discriminates against people with “learning defects,” criminal records, drug and alcohol dependence, and “other sexual conditions other than homosexuality, including transsexualism and other gender identity disorders.” Much of what he said was taken from a series of reports he wrote for CRS that quoted liberally from Moskos on “hanky-panky” in the military, “discreet homosexuals” versus “declared” ones, and the importance of military “values and norms” capable of “transcending individual self-interest,” which gays presumably, by definition, could not do. Burrelli also gave testimony that did not favor the ban, perhaps in an effort to appear neutral. He pointed out that if gays were forced to conceal their identity, there was a greater risk of blackmail than if they were allowed to be open. “In other words,” he said, “the policy itself actually may serve to create the security risk issue that you raise.”7
Burrelli was followed by other witnesses who sounded as though Senator Nunn had literally fed them his favorite lines through an earpiece. David Schlueter, a law professor at St. Mary’s University, seemed to replicate Nunn’s “thorny questions” strategy to raise fears about privacy, morality, and discipline. Letting gays serve, said Schlueter, “advances their personal private interests,” but what might it unleash? “Could military boards be required to adopt affirmative action for homosexuals to make up for past discrimination?” Could they be forced to provide the same housing, health care, and base privileges to gays as to straights? Schlueter then returned to the moral question, as had Burrelli, Nunn, and Moskos. “The law is grounded on deeply rooted and firmly held moral and religious values,” he said. “A key question before Congress is whether the military, as a paradigm of a law-and-order society, should be required to accept or accommodate a status or conduct which some service members, civilians, and potential service members would find unacceptable on moral or religious grounds.” His words were gleefully quoted by Chaplain James Hutchens during his House testimony five weeks later for the National Association of Evangelicals.8
Each of these testimonies seemed eagerly digested by the conservative senators of the Armed Services Committee Strom Thurmond, John Warner, John McCain, Trent Lott, Dan Coats, and John Glenn—who displayed a united front against gay service that reflected both the careful strategizing of the pro-ban delegation and the personal animosity of each of them to gays and lesbians. Senator Trent Lott, who later would step down as Republican leader amid accusations of racism after he praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential bid, made a halfhearted attempt to wrap his anti-gay animus in the mantle of military effectiveness. The American people, he insisted in his brief written statement entered on that first day of hearings in March, “do not believe the Federal Government should endorse homosexuality as a lifestyle—and that is exactly the message we will send if we lift this ban.” In the very next sentence, as though realizing he had forgotten to abide by the script, he suddenly changed tacks, jutting away from the issue of government approval and toward military performance: “These hearings must seek to answer one fundamental question: Will lifting this ban improve or hurt our ability to fight and win future conflicts? I say, ‘It will hurt.’ ” Senator Jim Exon, Democrat of Nebraska, conceded that he was “not completely . . . open-minded” on whether homosexuality could be “open and approved in the service.”9
Senator John Warner, a former navy secretary, framed his comments by saying that Clinton’s proposal would “compel the U.S. military to accept openly and acknowledge the existence of a class of people whose lifestyle is found by many Americans to be unacceptable.”10 It was a rather extraordinary admission—to concede that the military ranks were refusing to acknowledge what everyone actually knew to be true. Then there was the peculiar singling out of gay Americans. Tens of millions of different kinds of people had served in the U.S. military over the centuries, and many Americans would take issue with the “lifestyles” of many of them. But no law ever required a referendum on how those millions of people lived their lives before they’d be admitted to serve their country. Unless they were gay.
Warner suggested lifting the ban would be unfair to straights who signed up for military service believing that they would not have to ever encounter a gay person. Like many high-minded supporters of the ban, Warner insisted that he had no problem with homosexuality. “I have tolerance,” he said. “I have no prejudice.” But Warner said he must shelve his own tolerance and distinguish his outlook from that of a “young 17-, 18-, 19-year-old just coming into the military,” who might be less tolerant. It was for him that the ban must remain in place. Recruits like him are “coming out of what are usually small towns, and high school environments, coming out of the security of the town and the family and the school and all of a sudden being confronted with all of these new problems.” They are being “thrust into military life and asked to take on tremendous responsibilities, including risk of life.” Warner used this idealized—if patronizing—vision of small-town America, presumably free of the messy burdens of homosexuality, to endorse the intolerance he claimed not to have. “In their own simple way of thinking it through,” said Warner of these hypothetical young Americans, “they may just be right. And we have to listen to them and respect their views.”11 Intolerance of homosexuality was, for Warner, respectable.
Once again, the line in the sand around gays and lesbians was nothing short of remarkable. Imagine if it were considered acceptable for service members to break their contracts and receive benefits because our nation’s leaders decided to invade Iraq, when some troops opposed the decision. Yet Senator Warner considered a policy measure with far less impact on life and limb so radical and so objectionable that he sought to excuse enlisted personnel from service over it.
Despite Warner’s general resistance to lifting the ban, he was willing to tether his position largely to the whims of public opinion. From his research of foreign militaries, Warner concluded that open gay service “will work in a military organization if it works in society. If society is prepared and does, in fact, accept the openness of a professed homosexual or a lesbian, then it will work in the military.” The upshot, he said, was that he had seriously considered supporting an end to the ban, in part because he had heard that other countries had lifted their bans without problems. But after traveling throughout Europe and Canada, he concluded that what he saw “does not provide a basis for lifting the ban.” Only two nations, he said, have a policy of full nondiscrimination, Canada and the Netherlands. Canada had just lifted their ban six months before. The Dutch military was small and the Netherlands was more open to homosexuality than the United States. “It works for them,” Warner said. But that didn’t mean it would work for us. Warner’s position left him open to reconsidering the American ban should public opinion evolve toward significantly greater tolerance of homosexuality, or should the Canadians or Dutch prove themselves in future combat. But for the moment, “the issue of homosexuality has not reached a sufficient level of acceptance in American society for us as lawmakers to impose it as a matter of law on the young men and women coming into the military of the United States.”12
Not all senators on the committee were hostile to gay service. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan asked Burrelli if there were any studies or evidence that homosexuals in the military would be more likely to “engage in improper sexually related conduct than heterosexuals?” Burrelli answered cryptically, “There is no evidence that they will or that they will not.” Outside military life, Burrelli said, there is evidence that gay men are more promiscuous. If sodomy is illegal, then gay men, by definition, would “be involved in more illicit behavior.” Levin r
esponded that married heterosexuals can commit sodomy as well. “I do not believe that sodomy between a husband and wife fits the definition of . . .,” began Burrelli, before pausing and finally conceding, “well, yes.” “It does,” reaffirmed Levin, presumably referring to the fact that sodomy practiced by married heterosexuals was still illegal in the military. Burrelli tried to wiggle away: “I am going to start getting into something that I do not want to get into.” But Levin pressed on: “Is there any evidence in civilian life that homosexuals commit sodomy more often than heterosexuals, including husband fire and wife?” The twenty-two-member committee of his peers was silent. Neither Burrelli nor anyone else could answer.13
Levin concluded that there was no evidence for the ban against gays: “In terms of a rational basis, then, if you are looking at the likelihood of engagement in a prohibited sexual act, we do not have the data to substantiate that rational basis. Is that accurate?” Schlueter answered yes, and also acknowledged that he knew of no other cases where the antipathy of a unit toward an individual based on that person’s identity or beliefs served as grounds for limiting that person’s rights. Only gays.14
One day in April was supposed to be devoted to testimony from academics. The witness list included two professors of sociology, a professor of political science, and Lieutenant General Calvin Waller, a retired general with no academic background. Waller, who was deputy commander of allied forces for Operation Desert Storm, was fiercely anti-gay, and seemed to be on the panel for balance—apparently not enough academics opposed gay service.
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