Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Come Back?

Local ex-Navy sailor Joseph Rocha, one of the major players in the movement to allow gays to serve in the military, told us last year that he wants to return to service despite horrific experiences that were confirmed by an investigation. Will he and others be able to do so now that don't-ask-don't-tell is virtually dead? Slate says the answer is: "probably." But it will be complicated.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Come Back?
Congress voted to repeal DADT. Can gay soldiers who were discharged under the old rules re-enlist?
By Brian Palmer
Slate
Dec. 20, 2010

Lieutenant Dan Choi who was dismissed from the US Army for 'being openly gay'.Dan ChoiThe Senate voted to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on Saturday after weeks of wrangling. More than 13,000 service members have been fired since that rule came into effect in 1993. Can those people re-enlist?

Probably. For the past 17 years, service members discharged for homosexual conduct have been permanently barred from the military, even if they swore that their sexual preference had changed. During that time, Congress has considered several bills to repeal DADT, many of which would have explicitly permitted discharged service members to rejoin. (The process is technically called reaccession.) In the end, the bare-bones legislation that Congress is about to send to the president punts the re-enlistment issue to the Pentagon. We don't yet know for sure how the secretary of defense will handle the discharged soldiers, but the military's November report (PDF) supporting repeal recommended that they be permitted to come back. Secretary Gates commissioned the report and has so far endorsed its findings.

Any plan to take back dismissed soldiers may run into snags with the paperwork. Most gay people released under DADT received what's called an involuntary honorable discharge, which also applies to personnel with mental health problems or parental duties that preclude military service. Those who receive an involuntary honorable discharge are usually assigned the RE-4 re-enlistment code, which means they're not allowed to come back.
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It's not clear how the Pentagon is going to work around this bureaucratic problem...

John McCain says "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" must continue because...the economy is down?!?

I'm not an expert in the subject of homosexuality, but I did notice some interesting behavior on the part of my healthy, wholesome dog Hoopoe in the 1970s. (The name sounds strange now, but I had just read James Michener's The Source, in which a heroic figure bears the name.)

I have struggled to figure out how my dog could have been exposed to the homosexual agenda, and I think I've got it figured out. Forty-pound Hoopoe didn't like being restricted to our backyard, so he used to jump the fence and roam about town, even after we had extended the barrier to a height of seven feet. (He'd get his front paws over the top, then he'd hang there until his back feet managed to scramble up and over.) It must have been on one of these excursions that Hoopoe was indoctrinated. Unless, of course, he simply had inborn inclinations.

But one thing is certain: he was brave and bold, and would have been a valuable asset to any canine military operation.

Dec 4, 2010
This week in crazy: John McCain
The old maverick invents the weirdest reason yet to oppose the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"
By Alex Pareene
Salon.com

John McCain has finally, inexorably stumbled upon the weirdest and most transparently troll-ish reason yet to oppose the repeal of the military's ban on gay and lesbian service members: The economy sucks.

That's it. The Senate can't address a fundamental inequity, because the markets are down.

"I will not agree to have this bill go forward, and neither will, I believe, 41 of my colleagues, either, because our economy is in the tank," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee and the leading opponent of an immediate repeal.

For those playing along at home, John McCain conditionally supported the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" until Barack Obama got elected and began pushing the Senate to do something about it. Once military leadership told McCain the policy should be repealed, he said, he would vote to repeal it, and now that the Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have told McCain that it should be repealed, he is vowing to fight it with everything he's got.

But, like, he had excuses before. Not great ones, but they sounded coherent on Sunday shows. Once the commanders came around, he wanted to wait for the results of the Pentagon's review of how repeal would be implemented. That review is done. Then McCain just needed more time to read it. Then he had a problem with some of the survey questions. Then he was upset that more Marines oppose repeal than other branches. Then he was upset with the survey's response rate. Transparent straw-grasping, but at least those objections had something to do with the issue at hand...

McCain's vaunted "independence" was always something closer to incoherence. He'll hold wildly different positions on issues depending on the weather, or, more specifically, depending on whom he's friendly with and whom he resents today. The boxing enthusiast who once campaigned to ban Ultimate Fighting for no reason other than he didn't like the looks of it has always been intellectually inconsistent, to say the least. But he's lost his mind on the simple question of whether or not gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve their country openly and with honor.

If he thinks the answer to that question is no, he won't just come out and say it. In his attempts to avoid endorsing bigotry while simultaneously doing everything he can to keep discrimination enshrined in the law, he's clearly completely cracking up. Even his partner in irritating independence Joe Lieberman is being reasonable this time around...