The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy should be repealed. That said, I think it’s important to recognize what it was at the time — a step in the right direction. A baby step. The gay community, perhaps more than any other disenfranchised group, wants it all, and they want it all right now. Unlike ethnic minorities, most American gay rights activists come from a background of relative privilege, many of them the sons and daughters of full-blown WASPs. Their expectation of fairness and indignance at injustice is understandable, but they need to be careful not to alienate their pragmatic allies.
I’m not suggesting that the gay community should settle for less or accept incrementalism as sufficient, but rather that they should recognize the persuasion of the populace as a critical aspect of their struggle for equality, at least as important as the persuasion of the various branches of government. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell forced the recognition of gays in the military, and its punitive enforcement laid bare the fallacies behind prohibiting gays in the military, by reductio ad absurdum. It is shameful that it has taken so long to take the next step, but the effort of those who made that poignant example so obvious to our nation and our culture should not be denigrated. To do so is to forget the even more extreme injustice of the policy it replaced.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is a punch line now, showing both the absurdity of mandatory ignorance and the absurdity of banning that which can safely be ignored. In that capacity, it may have done more for gay rights than its authors could have imagined. It’s unfortunate that such a work of inadvertent satire was necessary to sway the most conservative parts of our military, government, and society, but it has clearly done that.
(You may now commence flaming my weak morals.)
