A ROAD TO DAMASCUS MOMENT: WILLIAM KRISTOL URGES HIS FELLOW CONSERVATIVES TO STOP HYPERVENTILATING ABOUT DON’T ASK DON’T TELL REPEAL

By: Paul S. Marchand

In a world where confirmation bias and fixity of opinion often leave those on opposite sides of any given issue largely talking past one another, hearing someone with whom one is accustomed to disagree espousing what is largely one’s own position can be quite surprising, leading to an OMG WTF moment or three.

So it was the other day when I happened to read a blog entry (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/don-t-fret-don-t-whine_524816.html) by William Kristol of the Daily Standard, entitled “Don't Fret, Don't Whine,” in which --- in what seems to be a “Road to Damascus” conversion experience moment --- he essentially urged his fellow conservatives to stop hyperventilating about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  In sum and substance, Kristol’s post repeated a question posed by another conservative blogger who asked "[a]t what point does concern [about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell] turn into hysterics, and when does it become insulting to our honorable men and women in uniform?"

To say that I was somewhat surprised to see William Kristol, of all people, essentially conceding the battle over open service by out LGBT service members, would be an understatement.  Certainly, Kristol’s call to his fellow conservatives to conduct themselves with “composure and dignity,” will probably fall on deaf ears among large numbers of his fellow travelers.

Certainly, Kristol’s view will not resonate well in some conservative quarters where the very idea of out GLBT people participating as first-class citizens in the life of the Commonwealth provokes high drama, conniptions, and hissy fits of a type not normally expected from ostensibly straight people.

Yet, the willingness of so prominent a conservative as William Kristol to essentially throw in the towel on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell suggests that, for many on the conservative side of the aisle, the dynamics of the Culture Wars may be changing.  What cannot be denied is that the queer culture war issues which so transfixed the nation just a few short years ago may be losing their power to animate a conservative base.

For, in truth, every year that passes diminishes the public sense of Otherness --- of Queerness, if you will --- that has historically underlain public discomfort with, and official sanctions against, America’s LGBT citizens.  As I noted in a prior post, an increasing number of Americans interact on a daily basis with people whom they know to be queer, but whose queerness has simply ceased to be strange, threatening, or philosophically disturbing.

Twenty years ago, when I first came out -- at the age of 26 -- to family and friends, the average age for coming out was in fact 26.  The passage of a generation has lowered the average age for coming out to somewhere in the early to mid teens.  The presence of more and younger out GLBT people, particularly in larger metropolitan areas, cannot but have had an effect on the way in which the larger culture addresses the reality of sexual orientation.  Time has a curious way of changing the views and expectations of even a William Kristol. 

Thus, while I wish Mr. Kristol had simply and forthrightly declared that DADT was a bad idea whose demise was overdue, I can at least acknowledge that he seems to be coming round to the view that the world won’t end, the West won’t decline, and America won’t collapse by allowing homosexuals to be cannon fodder along with her straight fellow citizens.

It is too early to tell how the aftermath of DADT repeal will play out, but it does appear that, if William Kristol’s Weekly Standard blog post is any indication, conservative thinking on this issue maybe not as predictable nor as monolithic as might otherwise have been expected. 

Certainly, there will continue to be those who will loudly object to the very idea that LGBT people can, or should, enjoy any incidents of first-class citizenship, but with such well-known conservatives as William Kristol beginning to come around on the issue of open service by out servicemembers, or former George Dubya Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson arguing for marriage equality, one may view the prospects for 2011 with guarded optimism.

We shall see if the year to come represents a turning point for America’s GLBT citizens, or whether the Culture Wars flare up again, as those who would set the clock back seek to arrest the steady progress not only of the LGBT community, but of the larger national community of which we are an ineluctable and integral part.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California.  He recently completed two terms on the city council there.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any other person or organization.

A VICTORY FOR AMERICA

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.