Will Obama End Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

There is much speculation as to whether or not Barack Obama will follow through with campaign pledges to end the horrendous policy known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which in this area is used in a witch hunt manner to force gays from the military. Now, there are reports based on a transition team website response that Obama does in fact intend to make good on his pledge. Personally, I will believe it when I see the policy actually repealed. However, I truly hope that the policy is repealed inasmuch as it has needlessly ruined so many promising careers. The other impact of the repeal locally where we have a huge number of closeted gays in the military is to potentially overnight increase the number of openly gay residents of the area. No doubt the Pat Robertson and his fellow Christianists will not be pleased. Here are some highlights from the San Francisco Chronicle:

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President Obama will end the 15-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy that has prevented homosexual and bisexual men and women from serving openly within the U.S. military, a spokesman for the president-elect said.

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Obama said during the campaign that he opposed the policy, but since his election in November he has made statements that have been interpreted as backpedaling. On Friday, however, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, responding on the transition team's Web site to a Michigan resident who asked if the new administration planned to get rid of the policy, said: "You don't hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it's 'Yes.' "

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"The question isn't if we do it, and the question isn't when we do it, it's how we do it," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, whose 2006 bill to repeal the ban earned broad support among Democrats in Congress but did not move forward in the face of a near-certain veto by President Bush. "I'm going to reintroduce the bill in the next few weeks," Tauscher said. "We've got the American people behind us."

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An ABC poll in July found that three-quarters of Americans supported allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military compared to 44 percent of Americans who expressed the same support in 1993 . . . Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., both of whom backed the 1993 policy, recently called for it to be re-evaluated. John Shalikashvili, who followed Powell as chairman, has called for its repeal, as has former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr, an opponent of gay rights and legal protections for gays. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Barr disparaged the policy as wasting money and talent.

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More recent years have seen high-profile discharges of gay Arabic linguists and other troops whose military jobs were deemed essential in Iraq, Afghanistan and the "war on terror" - dismissals that struck many people as inexplicable, said sociologist Melissa Embser-Herbert, author of "The U.S. Military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Policy: A Reference Handbook." "We know of gay, lesbian, bisexual veterans who have served in combat theater, and I think that's also a big piece of it," she said. "It's a much harder sell to the general public that that person who died or lost a leg didn't deserve to be serving their country."