By Fr. Claude Pomerleau, C.S.C.
Well, a lot of people still care. And so, in March 2010, the Gay Straight Partnership asked me to join an open discussion on the policy of the U.S. military toward gays and lesbians in their ranks. The existing military policy has been quaintly described as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
The discussion quickly moved beyond the medieval discussion of how many homosexuals can dance on the pin of a needle to how long it might presumably take the U.S. military to catch up with the 21st century and formulate a policy that serves military goals but doesn't violate human rights.
Most participants believed that the U.S. military would soon catch up with its allies.
Many U.S. allies, many of them part of NATO, have openly welcomed gays and lesbians into their ranks. Spain, Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Belgium and Israel (to mention only a few) have openly allowed gays and lesbians into their ranks, without problems.
Of course, Uganda, Chile, Iran, Iraq and North Korea consider gays and lesbians to be an abomination.
All the same, I'm happy to inform you that our universe continues merrily as part of the Milky Way.
I am not giving away national security secrets when I remind you that President Obama has given the military an order to update their policy toward gays and lesbians.
The military leadership has asked for one year to process that policy. We are not dealing with the Dharma Initiative here, or with a profound transformation of U.S. society.
No.
Simply bringing one of the most important national institutions up to speed in the area of human rights. In this way, the U.S. military will again recognize that institutions need nurturing. And like all the other countries that have stopped discriminating against gays, fair-minded Americans will wonder why it ever took so long.
Of course, it would be na've to imagine that some moral Neanderthals and political exiles from the Pitcairn Islands might not voice strong opposition to allowing gays and lesbians into the military.
Retired U.S. General John Sheehan has warned that allowing gays into the Dutch army was a cause of dangerous mission creep, leading to such organizational horrors as "peacekeeping." My favorite gay basher is Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, who once famously boasted that the Chilean army could whip the combined gay armies of NATO. However, to show that he was not just any narrow-minded extremist, he added, "It's not ideas that we're against. It's the spreading of them."
It seems that the U.S. military leadership, in keeping with past institutional policies allowing the recruitment of minorities and women into their ranks, will soon lay to rest that obsolete and unfair policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In so doing, the U.S. military will serve as an example for other institutions struggling with similar issues of institutional integrity and ethical fairness.
Hooah.
Fr. Claude Pomerleau, C.S.C., is a political science professor.
