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MmeGigs -> RE: Supreme Court Turns Down Challenge to 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' (6/12/2009 8:11:35 AM)
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ORIGINAL: lazarus1983
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ORIGINAL: MmeGigs
I'm not blaming the military, I'm blaming the people who are committing the violence. I feel that the military should do the same.
Explain to me how they're not. The military isn't using this policy to protect would be homophobes, it's to protect and allow to serve homosexuals while giving them some kind of protection. So again, explain to me how the military is NOT blaming people that commit acts of violence against open homosexuals.
Here you go - http://repositories.cdlib.org/isber/cssmm/cssmm09/ The military is demonstrably NOT using DADT to protect gay service members - open or closeted - and allow them to serve. Some snippets from the report.
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Although each of the Services developed training plans regarding Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in late 1999 or early 2000, a review by SLDN (Servicemembers Legal Defense Network) found that the training “rarely meets the standards set forth by the AHAP. The Army has come closest to meeting those guidelines. The Marine Corps openly acknowledged its training is inadequate. The Navy and Air Force have blatantly failed to meet the requirements altogether."
Moreover, according to SLDN, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell training often is conducted in a manner offensive to gay and lesbian service members. For instance,
• In Late August 1999, following the murder of Private Winchell, a Fort Campbell Army sergeant conducted a class on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The Sergeant called the class a “fag briefing” and referred to gay soldiers as “fags.”
• During an Army equal opportunity training session in January 2003, instructors told anti-gay jokes, after which the unit commander asked “anyone who is gay to raise their hand if they felt offended by the jokes.”
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell training at the Judge Advocate General School in 2001 contained video clips demeaning gay people and including the word “faggot.”
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Following the murder [of Private Winchell], Major General Robert Clark, the top of the chain of command at Fort Campbell, failed to hold accountable any person who engaged in or tolerated anti-gay harassment. One of the non-commissioned officers in Winchell’s unit whom the Pentagon labeled as “abusive” was merely “counseled” about “what was wrong with this leadership style,” given an opportunity to correct his behavior, and when he did not, was administratively transferred.
A climate of anti-gay hostility persisted after Winchell was killed. Graffiti featuring a picture of a baseball bat with the caption, “fag-whacker,” appeared in public places, a sergeant taught a class on the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, which he called a
“fag briefing,” and another sergeant forced soldiers to march to an anti-gay chant: “Faggot, faggot, down the street. Shot him, shot him, til he retreats.” The number of discharges under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy following Winchell’s murder increased
exponentially: In 2000 and 2001, respectively, 160 and 222 people were discharged from Fort Campbell under the policy, compared to 17 people in 1999.159 According to SLDN, “service members fled the base in an attempt to escape the environment Clark had created. They were literally running for their lives.”
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The argument that the military’s policy is coherent because harassment is targeted as a violation of Don’t Ask might be persuasive if the military actually enforced violations of Don’t Ask or Don’t Harass. But the record is bare of evidence that Don’t Ask violations are punished, and as is demonstrated above, the same is true with respect to violations of Don’t Harass. Meanwhile, the military vigorously enforces violations of Don’t Tell, by discharging gay people from the military as soon as they reveal their sexual orientation. Nearly 10,000 people have been discharged in ten years of enforcing the policy, and the vast majority of these service members were fired because they stated they were gay. Thus, although the military might assert that it prohibits anti-gay harassment because such conduct constitutes hostile “asking” and/or leads to “telling,” the fact that the military only punishes the telling, and not the asking or the harassing that leads to the telling, undermines this claim.
This was in there, too -
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In addition to impeding effective enforcement of the ban on anti-gay harassment, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy also hinders enforcement of the military’s prohibition on sexual harassment. Evidence indicates that the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy
excluding homosexual service members aggravates the incidence of sexual harassment because of “lesbian-baiting”; that is, the reporting of woman as lesbian if they refuse a harasser’s sexual advances or report sexual harassment. Commentators have suggested that lesbian-baiting, a form of sexual and sexual orientation harassment, explains why women are disproportionately targeted under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Whatever the intentions of DADT may have been, in practice it encourages discrimination and harassment.
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