This week's incendiary anti-gay comment is brought to you by Marine General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking military officer, who called gays "immoral" in a Monday interview with the Chicago Tribune. Pace was asked about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the homophobic Clinton-era policy that prohibits gay and lesbian service members from serving openly in the military.
"I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts," the general said in the interview. "I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way."
As expected, the reaction was swift and forceful from gay rights leaders. More interesting was the public statement of Senator John Warner (R-Virginia), one of the most pro-military men in the Senate. On Tuesday he issued a statement that said he strongly disagreed with Pace's view that homosexuality is immoral.
Pace's comments are notable in that they finally reveal the specious justification called "unit cohesion" that has been used successfully by the Pentagon to defend DADT. It's clear now that homophobia has always been the root motivation for supporting DADT, even as poll after poll has found that support of the policy from the general public has diminished substantially. A poll earlier this year of military personnel also found that most knew someone gay serving with them in Iraq and Afghanistan and didn't care.
Nathaniel Frank, a senior research fellow at the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, pointed out that in recent history, military leaders had carefully constructed a rationale for the gay ban that sought to confine its reasoning to military necessity rather than morality or bias.
"They came up with the unit cohesion rationale," Frank said, "which argued that the presence of gays and lesbians in a unit would undermine the morale, readiness, and operational effectiveness of the military. For some, this was just a cover for the real source of their resistance to gay service, which was moral."
Pace's statements this week amply demonstrate that contention.
"General Pace took the mask off," Dixon Osburn, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, told us Tuesday. SLDN, which has been fighting for the repeal of DADT for years, also noted that the Department of Defense discharged 612 service members under DADT in 2006. The number represents less than half of the total number of discharges in the fiscal year preceding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Osburn said that the new numbers show the Pentagon will use gay service members during times of war. "When military leaders need talent, skills, and qualifications of gay personnel, dismissals decline," he noted. "Then, during peacetime, the dismissal rate climbs again."
Pace's comments came as a "shock and a surprise," Osburn said, adding, "The comments reflect the huge disconnect between General Pace and gay service members."
And there are gay service members – an estimated 65,000 – that are fighting on the front lines.
Moreover, Pace's comments are hypocritical. Pace has no right to lecture the country on "morality" when, at the top of the chain of command, he presided over the military torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and, more recently, the maltreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It's also amazing that Pace chose to unleash his homophobia at a time when the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war is fast approaching and the conflict is in danger of complete collapse or escalation. Iraq is in a civil war and the government seems incapable of taking control of the country. Our troops are being injured and killed while Congress continues bickering over timelines for bringing them home.
Of course, those significant obstacles aren't of concern to Pace. Rather, the nation's top military man fans the flames of anti-gay prejudice by equating gays to adulterers. Even though the military has relaxed its recruiting requirement to grant moral waivers in order to enlist 1,600 convicted felons, Pace wants to draw the line at gays.
A change in military leadership is needed. And this week's outburst by Pace should give impetus to Congress to move forward with legislation to end DADT and allow gays and lesbians to serve openly.