Kerry: It's Past Time We Listened to Our Troops and Repealed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

03/09/2010

Kerry: It's Past Time We Listened to Our Troops and Repealed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

BOSTON – Senator John Kerry today announced his support for the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (S. 3065).

The Military Readiness Enhancement Act contains three main provisions: it will repeal the law that prevents gay Americans from openly serving in the military, prohibit discrimination against current and prospective service members on the basis of sexual orientation, and promote the ability of college students who wish to serve our country to join Reserve Officer Training Corps units at universities that currently prevent the establishment of ROTC units on campus.

“We’re overdue to wipe away the last stain of legal discrimination in our Armed Services,” said Senator Kerry. “Gays and lesbians should not have to hide who they are to be able to serve their country. President Obama, Admiral Mullen, Secretary Gates, former Secretary Powell, and – most importantly – our troops are speaking out, and it’s past time we listened.”

The bill was introduced by Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Carl Levin (D-MI) and has the support of 22 additional Senators.

President Obama, in his State of the Union address last week, argued that repealing the ban on gays in the military reaffirms the American ideals of equality, unity and diversity, the very source of our strength at home and abroad, the very values Americans in uniform defend around the globe.

And this change is overdue. This policy has costs beyond the immorality of the ban. More than 13,500 people have been forced to leave the military under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." And according to a Government Accountability Office report, the cost of recruiting and training their replacements had cost taxpayers $190.5 million through 2003. We have no estimates on how much more it has cost us in the six years since.

But the most eloquent and most convincing testimony against the policy of "don't ask, don't tell" comes, as such testimony usually does, from those who have paid the highest price for the policy's failings. And the most compelling I have ever read is on a tombstone in Congressional Cemetery, not far from the Capitol. It says, "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."

It doesn't have to be this way any longer. No more grave markers need to be etched with such painful words. Remember now the words of President Truman when - in the face of enormous outcry and opposition - he desegregated the military: ""there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin." Let's complete President Truman's mission, and wipe away the last stain of legal discrimination in the Armed Services of our nation.

"Senator KERRY. Well, sir, let me say to you, the question is—that is a very legitimate question. And I do not diminish that question at all. And it is one that people are wrestling with. But you know, if you go to kids' schools today, and some schools do not have discipline, some do. And I understand the distinctions. But you have got plenty of schools where, I think, there is discipline. There are openly gay people. They are dancing. And your kids are dancing in a heterosexual relationship. Now, there is discipline in the schools. It does not upset the kids. They all get along. They all go to classes together. They play sports together. And they go on. The same thing at college today "

"Senator KERRY. Well, I think that—all I can say is that I have experienced shocks that other people have experienced. The first time I ever saw two men dancing together in a place where there were gays I was sort of taken back by it. I admit it. And yet their dancing together was their choice, and it did not really impact my life. I still had the right to go out and dance where I wanted to dance, and to dance with a woman and to lead my life as I wanted to.

And I just think you have got to be very careful about where we are going in terms of this concept of tolerance and discrimination. I think you can work out a standard of behavior and I do not think it is going to be quite as challenging as everybody is making it out to be. "

But against that you have to measure what those problems really represent once you have acknowledged them: Why is there a problem? There is a problem because many people view gays with scorn or derision or fear. There is a problem because when people look at gays or lesbians, they find a lifestyle which they may abhor, cannot understand, do not want to understand, and believe they should not have to understand, and so do not.

The result is that we find ourselves put in the position of either embracing or rejecting what is a fundamental form of discrimination--a dislike of someone or something else because it does not conform to our sense of how we want to be or how we think everybody ought to be.

That is not what this country is supposed to be about. Whether it is a matter of skin color or religion, that is not who we are. And it is also not who we are with respect to matters of sexual preference.

Now, I am not going to spend a lot of time going into or discussing why someone is or is not gay . I am no expert on that. I can only suggest that the vast majority of people to whom I have talked who are gay do not view it as a matter of choice. They are born with that choice already part of their constitution. And for many, there is a lifetime of agony in trying to face up to the realities of who they are as a human being, as a person. And those agonies can drive some to suicide. They drive some to live a life of lies and running away. Others embrace it more readily and more capably.

We are supposed to be a society that does not drive people to run away from themselves or from their history or who they are. We are supposed to be a society which allows human beings to live to the fullest capacity of who they may want to be or who they are, defined by themselves, as long as they do not break the law, break the rules, intrude on other people.

Now, that is conduct, and conduct is what should matter in making judgments about what should or should not be allowed within the military . Status, the actual fact of being gay , and only being gay without attendant conduct that might offend somebody, cannot be sufficient in the United States of America to disallow somebody the choice, if they are qualified in every other regard, of serving their Nation.

Now, if we were to adopt a policy in this country that were to codify discrimination of this form, I think we would turn our backs on a number of different things, Mr. President, not the least of which is reality. Is there anyone in the Senate, or in this country, or in the Pentagon particularly, who believes that none of the 58,000 heroes listed on the wall in front of the Lincoln Memorial was gay ? I have never heard anybody, nor do I believe anybody could, make that assertion. Is there anyone who believes that there are not hundreds, perhaps even thousands of individuals who were gay who are buried beneath the white crosses at Arlington?

Is there anyone who does not believe that there are thousands of gays and lesbians in the military at this minute? Eleven thousand of them over the last few years have admitted it, voluntarily or not and they were drummed out.

We can be assured that there are surely thousands more who are scared to admit, who are forced by our policy to live a lie. They go about their business. They defend their country. They defend our freedoms. They defend the Constitution because they believe in what we, as a nation, stand for.

The question is not whether we should have gays in the military , because we have gays in the military . Gays have fought in the Revolution, in the Civil War, in both World Wars, in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Persian Gulf, and they fought, Mr. President, and they died not as gays or lesbians, but as Americans.

So the question is whether we as a country should continue to treat a whole group of people as second-class citizens? Is it appropriate to codify a lie, to pretend that there are no gays in the military ? Is it right to continue a policy that says to this group of Americans you are somehow not part of America, not entitled to help defend America, not someone whom we are willing to openly associate with in the military , even though every day in the workplace, every day in schools and colleges across America, we have learned to live and work together?

Mr. President, to codify discrimination in the military alone is not worthy of America. These are people who want to serve our country. They want to risk their lives and we respond instead by treating them like criminals, requiring them to hide from the fundamental part of their own identities not asked for but God given, forcing them into lives of secrecy and needless and senseless fear.