Column by Joe Gallenstein

With the release of the film “Milk” there has been an increased discussion about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning rights, and thankfully it looks like some progress is going to be made toward equality. Americans as a whole are realizing that gay rights are not special rights. They are equal rights. Americans are realizing that every person’s love is equal, no matter whom they love.

While the largest infringements of liberty for the LGBTQ community come in the lack of marriage equality, the most basic and stupefying restrictions are on those people who have a different sexual preference or sexual identity who wish to serve in our military.

These people, who want nothing more than to defend their country, can only join the military if they are willing to deny part of who they are. We as a country do not ask a Muslim, Catholic or Jewish soldier to hide their faith, nor do we ask a female marine to hide her gender. Yet we have deemed it appropriate to tell service people coming in to hide their love lives from their fellow members of the military.

We have done so without clearly considering the harm this has on our military, as we devote resources to remove personnel with differing sexual preferences. The result is federal money being wasted seeking to get rid of homosexual personnel, as studies in recent years have shown. Further, these efforts do more to break down cohesion in our units, rather than uniting them.

The Government Accountability Office estimated the cost to be roughly $190.5 million from 1993 through 2003 in a report from 2005, although an independent commission released in 2006 suggested the cost was probably closer to $363.8 million. The first number included only recruiting and training replacements for service members discharged under the policy, while the commission added the cost of recruiting, training and discharging personnel under this policy.

Clearly, this is a lot of money that our government is spending on personnel they will fail to utilize fully, but what is interesting is how many service people this has affected. It is impossible to know exactly how many people were discharged for violating “don’t ask-don’t tell,” but the estimations from the Government Accountability Office and the Servicemembers Legal Defense fund range from 9,488 to 11,694. These are people who wanted nothing more than to serve their country, but the astounding thing is how many more people in the LGBTQ community are currently serving in the United States armed forces.

According to a joint statement from 104 former officers who served in our military, there are an estimated 65,000 gays and lesbians currently serving in our armed forces, and there are over 1 million gay and lesbian veterans in the United States today. These officers, who include a former head of the Naval Academy, feel it is time that we treat all military personnel equally, and that by doing so we would help our military.

Many military personnel agree, though definitively not all. When I was attempting to enlist in the military, one female soldier I was training with was relatively open about her homosexuality, and has since served a tour in Afghanistan. None of her comrades degraded her for it, though many were apprehensive because of “don’t ask-don’t tell,” but some of the older veterans felt that dealing with LGBTQ service people was just part of being in a modern military.

One sergeant in particular comes to mind, for while talking about basic training with several new enlistees, he told them that at least one of their fellow service members they would be rooming with at basic training will be gay. His attitude was that one should get over it, for these people were just as qualified as anyone else.

I think most Americans agree that military personnel have the right to be themselves. Everyone should have the ability to be true to their county, as well as themselves. It is time we made the same leap our allies in the United Kingdom and Israel have and allow people from the LGBTQ community to serve openly in our military.