Normally, watching a Senate cloture vote on C-SPAN is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
But not yesterday morning.
Because yesterday morning’s cloture vote was the last hurtle to be surmounted before the Senate could go to an up-or-down vote on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and that up-or-down vote was the last Congressional action needed before DADT repeal could reach President Obama’s desk.
With cloture successfully invoked, millions of LGBT Americans, myself among them, watched anxiously, waiting, as it were, to exhale, as the Senate proceeded to the substantive vote on DADT repeal.
Indeed, so many of us were watching that C-SPAN’s servers crashed; never before had so many waited so breathlessly for so staid a process as a Senate vote to play itself out.
Yet, when the results of the vote were announced, the feeling was one of anticlimax. After all the drama, all of the posturing, all of the heated, often nastily personal opposition, DADT repeal had become a reality shortly past 3:30 p.m. on an overcast late autumn day in Washington City.
As I absorbed the impact of the vote, I remembered the words of an acquaintance of mine, a longtime straight activist for GLBT equality, and -as member of one of the Historic Peace Churches- a lifelong pacifist, who observed with gentle irony that repealing DADT would prove a not unmixed blessing. For as a lifelong religious pacifist, my acquaintance could not help but notice a bit of melancholy in the fact that obtaining an equal right to participate as out people in military hostilities should be such a landmark advance for LGBT civil rights.
As a High Church Episcopalian, I differ from my acquaintance on the issue of absolute pacifism, and I expect our theologies and our Christologies differ in other important ways as well, but I too find it a trifle ironic that as we approach our yearly commemoration of the Incarnation of Him who was called Prince of Peace, we in the GLBT community should be celebrating, in effect, a Congressional concession of our right to make war alongside our straight neighbors without having to conceal or lie about who and what we are.
Nonetheless, the fact remains that in a society such as ours, participation in military service remains in many ways a critical index of first-class citizenship. Having gone through the experience of being deterred from pursuing service in the United States Navy because of the so-called 123 Words (which began with the ringing proclamation “homosexuality is incompatible with military service...,”) the Reagan-era prohibition on LGBT service in the military, I understand why being able to serve openly, without having to lie about oneself, is critical not only to GLBT people, but to the larger America of which we are a part. For America, if she is to be true to herself and her place in the world, must be a nation where candor is as important a civic value as liberty itself. If one must be uncandid about oneself to serve one’s country, something is wrong.
To be effective, our Armed Forces must place, and have placed, a high value on truth-telling; when any servicemember must lie about him- or herself simply to be able to serve, unit morale and cohesion are adversely affected. When any servicemember must conceal a truth which others are able to tell, overall military effectiveness suffers. Conversely, candor helps enhance overall mission effectiveness by removing the irritant of concealment.
The Armed Forces are overwhelmingly an enterprise of young people. The average age aboard one of our Nimitz-class aircraft carriers is 19. The average nineteen year old is no stranger to GLBT people. She has gay friends. He knows lesbians. Queer references are ubiquitous in the popular culture from which every young American -even those in the military- emerges. Knowing and working with LGBT people is simply -to use the phrase from the movie Longtime Companion- “not strange.”
Indeed, interacting with GLBT people in the context of any workplace, military or civilian, is “strange” only to those whose regressive social or political culture wars agenda depend for their advancement on the existence of an officially-defined Other against whom it is legal to discriminate, whom it is permissible to exclude, and whose Otherness makes them perfect targets for being defined as enemies, and thus as scapegoats. This is a politics that rejects our American motto: “e pluribus unum,” (from many, one), in favor of a view more compatible with Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia than with our own history. This is the politics Sarah Palin and her supporters so perfectly epitomize.
And it is because a Palin politics of Other-defining and exclusion runs so contrary to our best sense of our American self, and runs so contrary to our history of putting another leaf in the table to accommodate the heretofore excluded, that yesterday’s vote to repeal DADT represents not just a victory for LGBT Americans, but for America as a whole.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City. He recently completed two terms on the city council there. The views expressed herein are his own.
