I love it that the MSM has finally awaken to Barack Obama's mealy mouth hypocrisy on DADT such as during yesterday's press conference at the White House. Indeed, it's nice to see those besides LGBT bloggers and activists beginning to hold some fire to Obama's feet. Whether or not it will prompt him to grow some balls on the issue will need to be seen. The fact that the military has lower standards for recruits to accept non-high school graduates, felons and others not qualified for the ranks but continues to discharge qualified gays is disgusting. I hope the attention now focused on Obama's hypocrisy continues to grow until it becomes untenable for him to get by with disingenuous inaction. Matt Yglesias has a good column in the Daily Beast that takes Obama to task. Here are some highlights:*
Back in January, Second Lieutenant Sandy Tsao, a U.S. Army officer based out of St. Louis, came out to her superiors as gay resulting, under current policy, in a dishonorable discharge. At the same time, she wrote a letter to Barack Obama congratulating him on his election and explaining her decision and asking Obama to "help us to win the war against prejudice so that future generations will continue to work together and fight for our freedoms regardless of race, color, gender, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation."
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On the campaign trail, Obama was clearly committed to ending discrimination in the military. "We’re spending large sums of money to kick highly qualified gays or lesbians out of our military," he observed, "some of whom possess specialties like Arab-language capabilities that we desperately need." Ever since the New Year, however, Obama and his team have been slow-walking the implementation of their promise.
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[W]hile the political logic behind the administration's thinking is understandable enough, the moral logic is contemptible. The dismissal of gay and lesbian soldiers was unjust when undertaken by administrations that believed in the policy. But disagreement about policy is inevitable in a democracy and sometimes injustice reigns. What we have today, however, is an absurdity—an administration that clearly does not believe in the policy, that is on record as opposing the policy, that campaigned explicitly on changing the policy, and that nevertheless declines to change the policy.
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Tsao and Choi are being dismissed, in other words, not because the president of the United States feels they should be discriminated against, which would be bad enough. Instead, they're being dismissed because the president doesn't feel like doing anything about it. Indeed, at this point sure laziness and indifference seems to be the best the defenders of "don't ask don't tell" can even come up with on their merits.
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No day is ever going to be a convenient day for the brass to stop doing what they're doing, and start dealing with the difficulties involved in getting soldiers accustomed to serving alongside openly gay and lesbian crew members. And no day is ever going to be a convenient day for the White House political team to pick a fight with the military. But that's a reason to avoid delay, not to embrace it. The current policy is as wrong as it was during the campaign, and firing skilled and patriotic linguists is as insane today as it was during the campaign.
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Instead of writing more letters to patriotic men and women in uniform who are tired of living a lie, it's time for Obama to start writing letters to members of Congress urging them to change the rules.
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The reality is that the military - which I see up close daily living in this area - is among the most change adverse institutions in the nation. The top military leaders NEVER embrace change or more modern thinking voluntarily. That takes leadership - something Obama will not take up on the issue of DADT. Indeed, there was a time the top Navy brass refused to believe that airplanes could sink capital ships - that is until Billy Mitchell demonstrated a bombing of the German battleship Ostfriesland off the North Carolina coast not too far from here in July, 1921, and proved the top brass foolishly wrong. The same will happen with ending DADT if someone will but have the guts to push it through.
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