Gays in the military expert Aaron Belkin says a recent rise in discharges under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ includes straight soldiers and sailors using the ban on openly gay service members as their get out of Iraq free card. (Photo by Jay LaPrete/AP)
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JOSHUA LYNSEN
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
The U.S. armed forces discharged 742 gay service members last year, an average of about two per day, according to new data from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
SLDN spokesperson Steve Ralls said the tally, confirmed by the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, represents a loss of 386 from the Army, 88 from the Air Force, 177 Navy personnel, 75 Marines and 16 from the Coast Guard.
Those numbers are up 11 percent from 2004, when 668 personnel were discharged. Since the military began discharging gays in 1994 under the policy, more than 11,000 men and women have been removed from the military.
Avoiding Iraq
Ralls said the military does not generally reveal the circumstances leading to the discharges. But the losses are believed to include gay service members who out themselves as well as straight service members who pretend to be gay to avoid serving in the Middle East.
“There’s no doubt that there are service members who use ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ to avoid their service obligations,” Ralls said. “However, that’s a very strong argument for repealing the law. That would close that loophole and force them to fulfill their obligation to the country.”
SLDN is a national, nonprofit organization that seeks to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It also provides legal services to military personnel affected by the 1993 policy that bars open gays from serving.
Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, said evidence indicates about 40 percent of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges are service members using the policy as their get out of Iraq free card.
“These patterns started showing up even before [Sept. 11, 2001],” he said. “Now that there’s a war on, you could certainly hypothesize there are those who want to avoid the war.”
He said accounts from discharged service members, lawyers and others show just 10 percent to 15 percent of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges involve a gay service member’s involuntary discovery.
Belkin said the remaining cases involve service members who seek discharge because they face abuse in their unit, or want out of the military. Researchers believe the number of those cases are equally split, but aren’t sure.
“There’s no way to survey these people and say ‘Why did you leave?’” he said. “We don’t have their names, their contact information, and a lot of them never self identify to SLDN or any other gay groups, so we just don’t know who they are.”
Gay until discharged?
Military experts and former service members said “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges include heterosexual men and women who pretend to be gay to escape the armed forces.
“There’s no question about that,” Belkin said. “It’s a loophole that gays and straights use to avoid military service.”
David R. Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland, agreed.
“There are a significant number of straight soldiers,” he said, “particularly those who joined before the global war on terror, who are finding the military is not doing what they signed up to do.”
Although it’s widely recognized that straight soldiers, sailors and Marines use “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to escape the armed forces, Belkin said researchers have been unable to quantify the number.
“There’s absolutely no way to know,” he said. “There’s really no way someone who lied would ever admit that to a survey researcher.”
Bleu Copas, a 30-year-old former military intelligence officer who is gay, said the tactic shows how desperate some service members are to leave the armed forces.
“There’s a lot of [dissent] in the ranks as to whether we agree with our role in certain theaters [of war],” he said. “People may not be able to come to peace with that, so different people will come up with different escape routes.”
Copas, an Arabic linguist, accepted an honorable discharge in January after a service member outed him to his unit. But before he left the Army, Copas said he was aware of men and women who faked same-sex attractions in the hope that they’d be discharged.
Because the military’s enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is discretionary, Copas said such actions net mixed results.
“It doesn’t always work,” he said. “Sometimes the commander will see through this and request further proof in order to allow the discharge, because they don’t want to lose numbers.”
Copas, who now lives in Tennessee and is pursuing a master’s degree in counseling, said straights or gays pursuing a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharge could face other complications.
Any evidence of a “homosexual act” could trigger criminal prosecution. He said such prosecution is an added insult to service members who faced oppression or harassment due to their sexual orientation.
“We know the policy going in,” Copas said. “But when you get in the situation, you find that some hate can be very hurtful.”
Recent studies suggest such oppression and harassment is widespread.
The Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, a group whose research generally opposes “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” found a disproportionate number of military commanders “perpetrate or witness” anti-gay harassment.
A poll of more than 71,000 active duty service members at 38 military installations found that 80 percent had heard offensive speech, including derogatory names and jokes, targeted at gays. Five percent had witnessed a violent, anti-gay assault.
Researchers noted the numbers were disproportionately high when compared to statistics from civilian populations.
Belkin said the study confirmed a link between the legal codification of anti-gay sentiment, and a permissive attitude toward harassment.
“Until official policy stops targeting gays, it will be difficult for commanders to crack down on anti-gay harassment,” he said. “The institution simply cannot make a serious dent in the rate of abuse as long as it continues to fire people simply for saying they are gay.”
But Segal argued the study, which used some data from a 6-year-old survey, might not reflect recent changes in military behavior.
“I think it was more of a problem in the past,” he said of the anti-gay speech. “I think it is declining.”
Undermining national security?
Copas said recent reports that military recruiters are increasingly signing people who dropped out of high school, or have criminal backgrounds, demonstrate why “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be repealed.
“I mean, for God’s sake,” he said, “they’re turning to criminals to fill the ranks, to get enough numbers.”
Segal and others agreed that repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is the best choice that lawmakers can make.
“It strikes me as problematic that we have ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ as a policy,” Segal said. “It puts us out of step with the rest of the modern world.”
The Center for Military Readiness also wants “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” dropped, but not for the same reason. The group’s executive director, Elaine Donnelly, said the Defense Department should enforce federal laws already on the books banning open gays from serving in the military and not pander with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
“The simplest thing to do is to drop the [Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell] regulation and clear up some of the confusion about the actual law,” Donnelly said.
Her organization opposes military service by gays, and is also against straight people of the opposite sex sharing living quarters.
Donnelly also questioned the claims made by SLDN and Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, saying she doubts claims about the scope of the problem.
“If there is a problem, the answer is what we’ve been saying all along,” Donnelly said. “We advocate for full information to everyone, and making it clear what the law is.”
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