Don’t Ask, I’ll Just Tell You What the Law Should Be
Chuck Donovan /
Late last week a federal district court in California struck down the military policy on service by homosexual persons, an activist ruling that, among other things, faulted the 1993 law on constitutional due process grounds. Next week the U.S. Senate is scheduled to take up the legislative repeal of the 1993 law using a process that limits amendments and ignores the expressed preferences of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of whom have asked the Congress to wait for completion of the Defense Department review due on December 1 of this year.
The sequence of events in this truncated debate leaves the U.S. Senate preparing to legislate in the dark next week. It began last January, when President Obama exhorted Congress in his State of the Union Address to repeal the policy that has come to be known by the misleading name “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In subsequent testimony to Congress, both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen announced the Pentagon review and testified that they personally favored repeal of the prohibition on military service by homosexual persons. Both men, however, indicated that their statements did not represent the views of the individual service chiefs, all of whom—General James Conway (Marine Corps), General Norton Schwartz (Air Force), Admiral Gary Roughead (Navy), and General George Casey (Army)—weighed in that they opposed congressional action to repeal the law before the completion of the planned review. (more…)