Owning DADT
May 8th, 2009 by Nick SaintAaron Belkin reports on the imminent first Don’t Ask Don’t Tell victim of the Obama administration:
Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about to fire him. Why? Because he came out of the closet as a gay man on national television.
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I spent a day with Dan Choi last month, and he is not someone we want to fire from the military. He loves the armed forces. He served bravely under tough combat conditions in Iraq. His Arabic is excellent, and he used his language skills to diffuse many tough situations and to save lives, both Iraqi and American. All of his unit mates know he is gay, and they have been very supportive of him. But he doesn’t want to live a lie.
Belkin thinks there is an easy fix that wouldn’t require a legislative fight:
A new study, about to be published by a group of experts in military law, shows that President Obama does, in fact, have stroke-of-the-pen authority to suspend gay discharges. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” law requires the military to fire anyone found to be gay or lesbian. But there is nothing requiring the military to make such a finding. The president can simply order the military to stop investigating service members’ sexuality.
An executive order would not get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, but would take the critical step of suspending its implementation, hence rendering it effectively dead. Once people see gays and lesbians serving openly, legally and without problems, it will be much easier to get rid of the law at a later time.
If this is right, Obama really has no excuse not to act quickly. On most issues, even ones I feel strongly about (abuse of the state secrets privilege, for example) I am thoroughly sympathetic to the difficulties of getting everything done at once. There are bound to be things the new president feels very strongly about that won’t even begin to happen for some time. But Obama is the Commander-in-Chief, so service members are his subordinates. If he can prevent his employees from being fired for their sexuality on his watch, putting it off for a better moment politically is not an ethical option.
