With session nearing end, Senate leaders spar over DADT repeal

Recent challenges to the 1993 United States military policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” have caused the debate over the controversial topic to resurface and heat up further.

The House of Representatives passed a bill in May that would repeal the policy, and now, the Senate faces a time crunch to decide the fate of the bill before the winter recess.

However, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Monday that he did not believe that Congress would repeal the law before Congress recessed.

On an aircraft carrier on the Arabian Sea, Gates told sailors that he was “not particularly optimistic that they’re going to get this done.”

“I would hope that they would,” Gates said.

The Log Cabin Republicans, a gay Republican organization, have also been pushing for the repeal of the law.

The group filed a federal lawsuit in 2004 against the policy, which went to court in July 2010. On Sept. 9, Judge Virginia Phillips ruled that the policy was unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendment, violating soldiers right to free speech and right to due process.

A month later, Phillips ordered military personnel to stop all enforcement of DADT, but the Department of Justice appealed to the Ninth Circuit, winning an injunction and keeping the policy in effect.

Another mark against the continuation of DADT is the recently published report conducted by the Department of Defense.

According to this report, which surveyed nearly 400,000 active duty service members, more than 115,000 of whom responded, about 70 percent of those surveyed “predict mixed, positive or no effects in the event of a repeal.”

Additionally, troops who believed that they had worked with a gay, lesbian or bisexual soldier rated their experience with said soldier as “very good,” “good” or “neither good nor bad” 92 percent of the time.

While these numbers bode well for the repeal of DADT, not all of the questions delivered similar sentiments.

Thirty percent of the entire U.S. military, and as many as 58 percent of service men and women in the Marine Corps, believe that a repeal would have a “negative” or “very negative” effect on the ability of a unit to “work together to get the job done,” according to the report.

The variance in responses from different parts of the military resulted in varying recommendations when the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Friday.

The Chief of Naval Operations said that the repeal would have minimal consequences, but the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and the Air Force and the Commandant of the Marine Corps all opposed the repeal.

According to the Department of Defense website, the chiefs of the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps opposed the timing of the repeal more than any concerns about the effectiveness of gay soldiers.

“Implementation of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be a major cultural and policy change in the middle of a war,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr., according to the Department of Defense website.

As Sen. John McCain and other Republicans try to filibuster the repeal, the question of when or if it will be repealed remains.

“I think it will be over-turned given American sympathies toward gays at the moment and their increasing political clout, but I don’t know when,” said Boston University political science professor Christine Rossell. “It is way down on the president’s list of important things to deal with at the moment so he will not provide any leadership on this issue. So, it may not be overturned until and if he is re-elected.”

BU political science professor Graham Wilson emphasized America’s inability to get over the issue of homosexuality.

“It’s extraordinary that this is still such an issue in the US. When they asked commanders from friendly countries like Israel and the U.K., what had been the result of allowing gays to serve, their reaction was that it was a non-event,” he said. “Why is the U.S. so hung up on equality for gays?”