There are already more than enough rules and laws to regulate the behavior of gay and lesbian soldiers, rules and laws that apply to everyone equally. I think it’s funny that the primary sponsors of these concerns (such as the shower issue) are in fact asking for “special laws” for gays and lesbians, yet they are also the first to scream “special rights” at the moment we gays ask for equality. Same old hypocrisy.
Time Magazine published an article about the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal survey, which has come under heavy criticism, even from military soldiers and Pentagon officials.
But even a top officer acknowledges some unease. “We’ve never done this,” Admiral Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, said in February after Pentagon leaders endorsed ending “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and said they would survey the troops about it. “We’ve never assessed the force because it is not our practice to go within our military and poll our force to determine if they like the laws of the land or not,” he told an activist from the University of California’s Palm Center, which monitors the issue. “I mean, that gets you into [a] very difficult regime.”
The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, perhaps the leading gay-rights group dealing with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” took a tough line against the survey. “No survey of the troops should be done,” director Aubrey Sarvis said Friday. “Surveying the troops is unprecedented — it did not happen in 1948 when President Truman ended segregation and it did not happen in 1976 when the service academies opened to women. Even when the military placed women on ships at sea, the Pentagon did not turn to a survey on how to bring about that cultural change.”
I’m not sure if the survey links will become broken, so I am offering the entire poll directly on my server just in case. You can view the DADT Poll Here. In any case, I think we can expect an overwhelmingly positive response from soldiers, and overall this survey will benefit the gay rights movement in the USA.