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There was a brief period of time after I graduated from college, when I considered joining the military. Growing up, I had always had this kind of romantic notion about serving in the Navy. My grandma had always spoken fondly of her days as a Wave, and my dad had lamented the Navy career he never had, thanks to asthma. They planted the military seed in the back of my mind. After graduation I had no real career plan, so when I started getting recruiting letters on a regular basis, promising adventure, a career with a decent salary, and a rather large signing bonus, I gave the military a brief thought. A very brief thought.
Aside from the thought that joining the military would mean that I'd have to leave Betty Please behind to go away for training, and then who knows where I'd be stationed, and for how long, was a much more unbearable thought; my life with Betty Please would have to be a complete and total secret. Forever. And though I was still partially in the closet at the time, I knew there was no way in hell I could live my life, our life, under the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. It's not healthy to live in such secrecy, hiding so much of who you are. I wasn't willing to do it.
But there are those who are willing to serve in secrecy. Who are willing to hide who they are, and who they love. Those who are willing to play the pronoun game, and to dodge conversation. Those who are willing to go to great lengths to make sure their secret never sees the light of day because if it does, they're out. Game over. Do you know how hard it would be to never slip up? And not just at work, but out in civilian life too. You could never be relaxed out on a date because you never know who you might bump into. And what do you do if you do end up in a serious relationship and you want to live together? All it takes is one person to find out and report you, and your career could be over.
Don't Ask Don't Tell was supposed to be a temporary policy, until there was a better policy, that would allow gay men and women to serve in the military as long as they were not openly gay. What we've ended up with is a failed policy that's been around, unchanged for the last 15 years. Since DADT was implimented, more than 13, 000 service members have be discharged. These service members, many of whom have served in combat, lose their pensions, GI bills, access to the VA, and any other benefits they would have received had they not been discharged under DADT.
When President Obama ran for office, one of his campaign promises was to repeal DADT. Yet, since he's been in office 250 GLBT service members have been discharged under the DADT policy. Now I understand that the country is in a giant economic mess, and involved in a fair amount of military action right now, but he has taken no action. And when a case involving DADT was denied a hearing by the United States Supreme Court, the President took no action. During his campaign days, he said that repealing DADT was going to take leadership, so where it that leadership? It's my understanding that by executive order he could put a hold on the enforcement of DADT until Congress reviewed the policy. Is he really too busy to do that?
President Obama's inaction on this issue, as well as a recent statement out of the Obama Justice Department about DOMA (watch Rachel Maddow's Fierce Advocate segement for more info), have caused quite a stir in the GLBT world. As a way to passify the recent outrage over what many of us concider back pedaling on campaign promises, Obama signed a declaration, granting some benifits to same-sex partners of non-military federal employees. I'm not sure exactly what these benifits really amount to since health insurance wasn't included in there, but whatever. It strikes me as odd that it would seem ok to grant benifits to same-sex partners of one group of federal employees, but another group of federal employees will lose their jobs
