Save a Family, Let Gays Serve
This post was submitted by Regan, who is interested in covering legal issues for TNG.
Some interesting arguments came out at the hearing, but I was most intrigued by one made by Deroy Murdock over at the National Review Online. In arguing for the repeal of DADT, Murdock makes most of the familiar arguments for allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly, as well as one that might be a little more controversial:The battle-cry “Think of the children” also applies to this issue.
This makes me a little uncomfortable, since it sounds an awful lot like a new way to get rid of the gays that might appeal to homophobes more than anything else. But maybe I’m just being too sensitive. Thoughts?
While gay couples and same-sex parents might disagree, gay service members generally are less likely to have spouses and kids awaiting them stateside. Therefore, pro-family conservatives should decry a policy that strips a childless gay soldier of his uniform, but keeps a straight GI in his body armor, far from his wife and kids, on multiple combat tours in Baghdad. Since 2003, NBC News reports, the Pentagon involuntarily has redeployed 58,000 such “stop-lossed” servicemen and women.
7 comments:
Of all the ridiculous arguments, the anti-gay forces have come up with one I hadn't heard before: allowing gays to serve openly will increase the HIV rate in the military. Well, only if all your stud straight boys start letting themselves get fucked unprotected. There have always been gays in the military, and they have been having sex with other gays and straight-identified men while enlisted. Read any one of Steven Zeeland's books about gays in the different branches of the armed services or Randy Shilts's epic, infuriating Conduct Unbecoming (1993). If these military morons knew their history and weren't totally blinded by their prejudices...
Regan -- The future assistant professor in me joins you in your sensitivity. Doesn't Murdock's argument perpetuate stereotypes of young gay men as unattached and without families? Even if the stereotype is roughly accurate, as it seems to be, we might think that it is pernicious because of its roots in historical injustices, without which maybe gays would have kids at roughly the same rate as straights. Or whatever. Choose your critique.
But context matters for these things. Reading Murdock's article, there is no implication that he's anti-gay, and he certainly does not imply that gays are better off dead. Rather, he makes what seems to be a true point: gays are less likely to have kids and, all else equal, it's better to have dead soldiers without kids than dead soldiers with kids. Seems fair enough?
If we want to be theoretical, we can point to all sorts of ways in which this sort of argument could lead to nasty places (e.g., conscripting gays) or play into pernicious stereotypes but, in context, I don't see how it does. Murdock's point is a minor suggestion, unlikely to gain much traction, in a much larger rebuttal to "military readiness" arguments.
If he were basing his whole argument on the idea that gays don't tend to have families, I would certainly have a problem with it. As it stands, however, it's more of an afterthought, and an apparently true one at that. I'll keep my outrage on the shelf.
Actually, it's less of a "dead soldiers" argument than a "time away from kids" argument, but that's a matter of degree, not kind, in my opinion.
Ugh -- this argument makes it sound like gay soldiers are more disposable than straight soldiers. As if no one gives a shit if we truck on over to Iraq for a couple months every now and then.
Yr not being too sensitive; this rationale is ludicrous.
It is a ludicrous argument, but sometimes taking an argument to its extreme causes new sets of discussions.
I'm pretty sure that once gay soldiers are allowed to serve openly, the numbers of gay soldiers with loved ones/families/children to come home to would increase. If you're dedicated to your military service, and you know a gay relationship will get you thrown out of that service, you're less likely to engage in "conduct unbecoming." No?
Allison -- I once heard a great talk by (the impossibly cute!)Aaron Tax of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. Among other topics, he spoke on the impact of DADT on queer service members. There were some heartrending stories, not least of which was about a lesbian couple. One of the women had been trained as a physician by the military and was still under obligation to the service. Her partner contracted a serious cancer and needed to move to a larger city for medical treatment. The officer faced a choice: either keep quiet, let her partner move to a distant hospital, perhaps to die, and visit whenever work allowed, or tell her supervisors about the relationship and request that she be transferred to a new duty location nearer her partner's hospital. In practice, this meant choosing between her ailing partner and her military career.
When she chose her partner, her commanding officer initiated discharge proceedings. The real kicker is that, because she had not yet fulfilled her service requirement, the military also asked her to reimburse the government for her medical training. SLDN helped her appeal the reimbursement request. I think the case is still pending.
Even if you do not agree with Murdock's spin on why DADT is anti-family, you've certainly pointed to a second, more compelling line of attack.
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