Can we recall that LGBT military exclusion is a national security issue, not just a "gay" one?

by Ken

I'm encountering a lot of understandable and welcome anger among LGBT colleagues, and increasingly in the mainstream media as well, regarding the Obama administration's apparent write-off of any attempt this year at undoing the military's dreadful "don't ask, don't tell" policy of excluding healthy, qualified LGBT candidates from U.S. military service. One pair of points we keep hearing is:

* the role played by the issue's relative importance to the LGBT community (i.e., "Just how much do they care?"),

* and the role played by the importance of the LGBT community to the Obama administration (i.e., "How much do we care how much they care?").

The theory is that the Obama people aren't persuaded that the issue is important enough to LGBT folk, and that the urgencies of LGBT folk aren't important enough to them, to cause the administration to assign the issue immediate priority.

The point I'm not hearing, and it's one point that needs to be made clear in the DADT fight, is that this is at least as much "a national security issue" as it is "an LGBT issue." I've been grappling of some way of communicating this (not that anything I write here will make a difference). While I continue to try to puzzle it out, here is the basic argument:

Even if the Bush regime hadn't done so much to decimate the U.S. military, it strikes me as literally insane to be depriving our fighting forces of the contributions of this entire category of able-bodied and -minded folk who want to serve their country. But when you factor in the state to which our military was reduced by eight years of unchecked Cheneyism, pressuring desperate military recruiters to overlook virtually all service disqualifications except the dreaded LGBT one, the policy of exclusion goes beyond insane. ("Beyond insane" -- I think I've finally found my shorthand description of the mentality of the Bush regime.)

When you then factor in specialized areas like linguists and translators, where we are known to be perilously short-handed and the shortage is known to be wildly exacerbated by LGBT exclusion, the case becomes unarguable to me that defenders of the status quo, and in general opponents of welcoming LGBT candidates into our armed forces, really don't care about the nation's security -- or at least not as much as they care about maintaining their personal bigotries.