Colonel John Ripley, a retired marine, called gay people “walking depositories of disease.” Under the “queers, cowards, and thieves” rule, which according to Ripley was a mainstay of the Marine Corps, anyone falling into any of these categories would be cordoned off from the group. On one ship, someone known to have been gay reportedly “went over the side.” Ripley said the military was “so supercharged and electrified over this that they are prepared to take matters into their own hands.” Charles Johnson, also a retired Marine, said the ban could not be lifted—not because “middle America will not accept this,” but because “a superior power, God, will not accept this.”53
The May House hearings also provided a forum for Brigadier General James Hutchens, the associate director of the NAE’s Commission on Chaplains. Hutchens viewed himself as a spokesman for the moral warriors on this issue, and he used the opportunity of his congressional testimony to make the case that homosexuality was a “moral virus” that was threatening to infect the military and society at large. “I come to speak to that aspect of the homosexual issue represented by the M word,” he said, “the word that for one reason or other has not been surfaced with sufficient visibility to allow for adequate debate.” The M word was “morality,” the word that “has been tiptoed around by many in our military and political leadership, for fear of unleashing the wrath of the homosexual movement of this country.”
In his testimony, he cast gay equality as “an infringement on the religious rights of service members.” “To require service members to serve with those whose status and thus their behavior is in direct opposition to their own religious and moral beliefs,” he said, “is to show a gross insensitivity to and disregard for those beliefs, and to provide a climate where those beliefs and values are institutionally ‘trashed.’ ” Hutchens argued that lifting the ban would put the government “in the position of establishing what is right and wrong. That, I would submit, infringes on the First Amendment to the Constitution, that becomes an establishment of religion issue.”54
Apparently his bombastic stance didn’t work the other way around: Given Hutchens’s certainty that the ban was, in the first place, an expression of Christian religious belief, he might have allowed that it was the existing policy that violated the establishment of religion, not the contemplated change. But this was not a line of thought he seemed to pursue. Instead, for emotional effect, he painted a grim picture of a bleeding Christian soldier, wasting away on a battlefield at the hands of a gay chaplain whose ministry would be worse than worthless to him: “Surely the soldier lying on the battlefield with a sucking chest wound and calling for a chaplain has the right to expect the solace, comfort and ministry of a chaplain whose presence and touch is not morally offensive or physically repulsive. A wounded or dying soldier deserves something better than the morally compromised ministry of a homosexual chaplain.”55
Hutchens left Congress with a list summarizing the Bible’s views on homosexuality:
1. The wrath of God is being revealed against it.
2. It is based on a refusal to honor God.
3. It is based on ingratitude toward God.
4. It is based on a willful choice.
5. God has lifted his restraining hand.
6. What starts as a choice becomes all-consuming.
7. Those who practice it know full well God’s decree, yet continue to aggressively promote this behavior.
8. Condoning homosexuality is wrong, and is a further step away from God.56
The list reflected much about the psychological worldview of Hutchens and, as he had claimed, probably millions of other Americans: First, there is no such thing as a homosexual. Instead, we all have appetites and some of us have strong appetites for aberrant sexual behavior and weak wills for resisting it; so-called homosexuals are really only heterosexuals with a self-control problem. Second, society must make clear that people have the responsibility to make sometimes difficult choices, such as refraining from homosexual behavior, no matter how appealing it may seem. Third, belief in God will help in this endeavor. And finally, the society that condones the wrong choice will suffer at the hands of an angry power.
AS THE HEARINGS made waves across the country, the White House, with input from Defense Secretary Aspin, was privately struggling to hammer out its own policy in classic Clintonian fashion—triangulating in an effort to please all parties. Meanwhile, David Mixner had gotten a string of assurances from White House aides that Clinton would follow through on his promise to lift the ban by executive order after the six-month study period was over. Although skeptical, he took the leap of faith, and made it his job to reassure other gay rights advocates that they had nothing to worry about, a move that further slowed the response of the worried activists. A week before Nunn’s hearings even began, Clinton had said publicly that he would consider a proposal to segregate gay troops in job, deployment, and housing assignments. His announcement so angered gay rights activists that Mixner appeared on ABC’s Nightline to publicly break with the president on the issue of gay service.57 Clinton, it seemed, was accepting defeat before Nunn’s hearings had even begun.
Nunn had been so successful with his hearings that the White House had little hope left that it could beat back a congressional override of an executive order. In March, Barney Frank lent cautious support to a policy compromise being floated around Capitol Hill: It would be a form of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but it would allow private homosexual conduct off base. Frank was known as a brilliant lawmaker and a powerful public champion of the dignity of gays and lesbians. But he was also a consummate insider in Washington who prided himself on his hard-headed approach to the real world of how things get done in politics. Frank’s support for this plan infuriated some gay and lesbian advocates, as it gave opponents of full repeal the political cover to support a halfway measure. And as with Aspin’s position in January, Frank’s public admission that there was insufficient support in Congress to end the gay ban seemed to sap momentum for the fight; some argued that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Clinton, too, seemed to have lost the stomach for the battle. Despite the work of his transition team in the weeks after being elected, he had largely punted the issue to Aspin at the Defense Department, who was more concerned with reshaping the military for peacetime than devoting political capital to ending the ban. The president did not assign experienced aides to manage the gay service issue. His wish to please a military leadership he was reportedly in awe of further weakened his will to fight the Joint Chiefs. And the slow start and continued disadvantages of gay rights lobbyists meant there was insufficient support on the ground to turn public opinion in their favor. While Vice President Gore argued with Clinton in July that he ought to lift the ban by executive order as a matter of principle, even if Congress threatened to write the ban into law, Clinton was through spending political capital on the issue.58
THERE WOULD BE no executive order. On July 19, Clinton announced the new policy at a carefully choreographed speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. Flanked by Les Aspin, Colin Powell, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, with a backdrop of fifteen giant flags, Clinton spoke to a military audience. There were no representatives from gay and lesbian groups. He described the policy debate in great detail, acknowledging that it was “not a perfect solution,” that it was “not identical with some of my own goals,” and that it “certainly will not please everyone, perhaps not anyone.” But he cast the policy as a triumph, calling it a “major step forward” and an “honorable compromise.” It was, he said “the right thing to do and the best way to do it.” Citing the expertise of Charles Moskos, the president said the issue of gay service was probably harder to resolve in the United States than abroad because of the strong emotions of both sides, particularly of religious people. Clinton also accepted the presumed tradeoff between gay service and military effectiveness, saying the compromise “provides a sensible balance between the rights of the i
ndividual and the needs of our military to remain the world’s number one fighting force.”
On the same day, Aspin signed a policy memo. This was the document that actually ordered the military to implement the policy Clinton announced at Fort McNair, though further details of the final policy—its “implementing regulations” and the individual service branch memos designed to ensure servicewide compliance—would await the masterful hands of government lawyers later that year. Thus the “policy” refers to the Pentagon requirement, developed by order of the president, that known gays be discharged, as contained in Aspin’s written July memo and subsequent legal regulations directing how it should be implemented. White House officials and, soon, Les Aspin—though not President Clinton himself—described the policy as “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue,” referring to the omission of asking by recruiters, the ban on telling by gays and lesbians, and the promise that gay people would not be proactively sought out for discharge, but would only be separated when their sexuality came to the attention of commanders.59 It would come to be known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” for short.
The policy largely implemented the June recommendations of the Military Working Group. Clinton gave scarcely a nod to the five-hundred-page Rand report, released in July, that found sexual orientation “not germane” to military service. Paying lip service to the privacy zone promised for gay and lesbian troops, the policy said that “sexual orientation is a personal and private matter, and homosexual orientation is not a bar to service entry or continued service.” In the biggest change from previous regulations, the policy directed that applicants would “not be asked or required to reveal their sexual orientation.” But, as in the past, it called for the “separation” of service members “for homosexual conduct,” which was defined to include “a statement by a service member that demonstrates a propensity or intent to engage” in homosexual acts. These acts were defined as “any bodily contact” between members of the same sex undertaken “for the purpose of satisfying sexual desires,” or which a “reasonable person would understand to demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts.” The policy explained that a “statement by a service member that he or she is a homosexual” would create a “presumption that the service member is engaging in homosexual acts or has the propensity or intent to do so.” To make matters more confusing, the policy stated that, despite that presumption, the accused could try to argue that the statement did not indicate a likelihood that homosexual conduct would take place. Otherwise, any statement of sexual orientation would result in separation, as would evidence of homosexual conduct.60
ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1993, two months after the final Senate hearings in which Powell and Aspin showed up to defend the Clinton policy, the full Senate voted to codify this impossibly convoluted policy into law; this more restrictive version of the Clinton-Aspin ban looked to some more like a continuation of the old, outright ban on gays. For the first time in history, the policy on gay service was a matter of federal law, and not just Defense Department regulations, thereby making it much harder to change in the future. The final vote in the Senate was 92 to 7, although since the measure on gay service was part of a much larger defense authorization bill, the tally does not directly reflect the actual positions of senators on this issue. A better indication of this came from the Senate’s rejection, 63 to 33, of an amendment offered by Senator Barbara Boxer to drop the ban and give the president the final authority in the matter.
Both the policy and the law required gays to conceal their identity and remain celibate both on and off base. The minor differences between the two primarily reflected legal concerns of the senators who were worried about courts striking down the policy. But the differences also reflected the successful efforts of conservatives in Congress to use the statute to send a message that gays and lesbians were unwelcome in the military. Unlike the policy, for instance, the statute did not say that sexual orientation was a private matter, and in fact did not even mention orientation at all. Instead, it called homosexuality “an unacceptable risk” to morale, order, and discipline and, in a “sense of Congress,” left open the option for the secretary of defense to reinstate the questioning of recruits, which would effectively wipe out the “don’t ask” half of the policy. In this sense, the law was more restrictive than the Pentagon policy, but this does not mean, as some have argued, that the policy actually contradicts the law. At bottom, the differences were symbolic. Both stipulated that gays would be fired if their homosexuality became known, just as they always had been. And by stating the intention to cease asking recruits if they were gay at induction, both created a world where gays and lesbians were formally invited to lie throughout their service. Hence the overall policy—including the statute—quickly became known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” What Nunn’s law did was to strip Clinton’s policy of even its minimal references to respecting the privacy of homosexual orientation. This was not only a slap in the face to gay service members; it also had a damning impact on how the policy was actually carried out.61
Once the Senate weighed in, Clinton again sought to save face, just as he had done in July when he announced his policy as an “honorable compromise.” The White House moved to declare victory, saying through press secretary Dee Dee Myers that the legislation was no defeat but simply “puts back into play legislation we said we could live with.” The Nunn bill was meant as a repudiation of Clinton’s policy; the administration insisted it was “consistent” with the White House policy issued in July, a statement that was technically true.62
Two weeks later, the House followed suit, passing an identical bill by a vote of 301 to 134 as part of that year’s defense spending bill. A majority of Democrats voted for the bill, and only twelve Republicans voted against it. But 121 Democrats opposed the bill. The House also soundly rejected efforts by both sides to water down the legislation. By a vote of 291 to 144, lawmakers defeated a Republican amendment seeking to reinstate the asking of recruits whether they were gay, and they similarly rejected, 264 to 169, an effort by Representative Marty Meehan to cancel the ban and leave the matter in the hands of the president, as Senator Boxer’s amendment had sought.63
The House bill was sponsored by Representative Skelton, of Missouri, who said he sought to “close the door on this painful issue.” Saying that “enough is enough,” he assured Americans that the law punished only conduct, not status. Skelton said this even though he had personally worked hard to follow in the House what Nunn had done in the Senate: strip the Clinton policy of a provision specifying that sexual orientation was not a “bar to service,” and adding language calling gays and lesbians an “unacceptable risk” to the military. On November 30, President Clinton signed the bill into law, and by December, the Pentagon had drafted regulations stating how the policy would be implemented in all branches of the armed forces. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” went into effect on March 1, 1994.64
5
The Evidence
AMERICANS LIKE TO BELIEVE they live in a rational, pragmatic country, a place where laws are fair and justice makes sense. But as we have seen throughout our country’s history, the realities of American life are often far less grand than the ideals. So we must ask: How rational is a ban on openly gay troops? How fair is it? And for that matter, does it even make sense? Is this ban truly necessary to preserve the integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. Armed Forces?
And as we look more closely at the ban and its effects, we must consider how we have come to our current situation. What role have public opinion and beliefs played in shaping this policy—and what role should they play? Likewise, what is the proper—or perhaps we should say necessary—role of emotion, fear, prejudice, animus, ignorance? And what is the proper—or desirable—role of facts, research, evidence, scholarship, knowledge?
There are many ways to begin answering these questions. While none of the evidence on gay service is perfect—it is difficult to gather data on something whose very exis
tence is repressed by law—there is actually a vast body of data on homosexuality in the military. And it is worthwhile to pause briefly from our historical narrative in order to fully grasp what is known about gays in the military. This minor detour will look first at research conducted primarily in the United States, and then at the experiences of other militaries around the world that have allowed gays to serve openly over the past generation.
The government’s conclusion that banning open gays from the military is necessary to preserve privacy, cohesion, and effectiveness is wholly unsupported by the research. In fact, existing data show clearly that open gays can and do serve in the military without undermining cohesion, and that the gay ban itself causes more problems in the military than the presence of open gays in a unit. The evidence for this is transparent, uniform, and undeniable. It comes from a vast range of sources: studies, statistics, interviews, opinion surveys, military data, government reports, academic experts, independent assessments, internal reviews, press accounts, and more. The sheer volume of this data is surprising. Unfortunately, in our history of the debate over gay service, such evidence has played only a sporadic role. And this is because the evidence has been consistently and tragically ignored every time the government has confronted the issue of homosexuality and the military.
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