Talking to Moderates: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal

The Senate is planning to vote this week on an amendment stripping Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal from the 2011 Defense Authorization bill. The current language in the bill—which an amendment would aim to alter or remove—is a compromise that would repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law now but give the military the time it needs to finish its ongoing study of how best to implement repeal before that change goes into effect. This approach would untie the hands of leaders at the Pentagon by removing the outdated law, while ensuring that the transition to a new personnel policy takes place without disruption to our fighting force. Below are the key points to emphasize when speaking to moderates about the compromise.

• America’s military leaders believe the law is outdated and should be repealed. Both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, testified before Congress in full-throated support of repealing the law, saying in a recent congressional hearing that repeal is “the right thing to do” and the question “is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it.”¹ And the military has already put in place a process to implement this change, ensuring that the transition will be as seamless as possible for our troops.
  
• The compromise ensures that the repeal is implemented responsibly. The current language is crafted in a way that respects and incorporates the military’s implementation process and guarantees that the transition will take place in an orderly and responsible way. It ensures that the change will not take effect until the study is completed and leaders at the Pentagon are certain that the modification will not affect military readiness or effectiveness.
• It’s about the mission, not the individual. Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in a responsible manner would put the focus back where it belongs: on our military mission, not an individual’s personal life. It would allow our military to recruit and retain any qualified, patriotic, and courageous American who wants to serve our country.
• Congress must act now to untie the hands of military leaders. Although the military has put an appropriate and thoughtful process into place to ensure that this transition is smooth and maintains the primacy of our military and national security, it cannot execute that process without Congressional action. The implementation report is due to Secretary Gates on December 1st, 2010, but if Congress has not yet acted to remove the outdated law by that point, the military will be hamstrung and unable to carry out the plan it has so carefully crafted. The compromise language is endorsed by President Obama and Secretary Gates. It would harmonize efforts in Congress and at the Pentagon by giving the military the time it needs to implement the necessary changes to its regulations and removing the statutory impediments that currently stand in the way of executing military leaders’ plans for a coordinated and orderly transition.
• The compromise has wide and bipartisan support in Congress. The current language was included in the Senate bill by a bipartisan vote of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Identical language was also included in the House version of the bill, garnering the support of 234 Members of the House—including Republicans and moderate Democrats.
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a relic of the past. Our country has changed dramatically since the law was enacted. In 1993, only 44% of Americans supported allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly in the military—now more than three-fourths of the country holds that view, including 77% of Independents and 64% of Republicans.² Back then, military surveys showed that about three-fourths of men and half of women in the service were opposed to the presence of gay people openly serving.³ Now, three-fourths of troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan say they are personally comfortable in the presence of gay and lesbian people, and 45% say they suspect that they had already served or were currently serving with a gay person in their unit.⁴