Richard Cohen on: Don't Ask, Don't Think.

Don't Ask, Don't Think

By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
January 18, 2005

In one of those itsy-bitsy items you're likely to miss, the New York Times reported last week that, since 1998, the military has discharged 20 service personnel who spoke or had studied Arabic, six from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. They all had, in some way, been caught being gay. Try translating that into common sense.

This country, this government, this Congress and social conservatives in states both blue and red have so much invested in anti-gay policies that they will, if need be, jeopardize national security. It does not matter that Arabic interpreters are badly needed in Iraq, where they could save lives. What matters more -- what is downright paramount -- is that no gays get into the military or, if they do, that they stay deep in the closet, where, of course, they are smugly felt to belong. This is national policy.

The illogic of "don't ask, don't tell" can produce a pounding headache in any thinking person, but it is not without precedent. In the McCarthy era, the government rid itself of some Asian experts because their patriotism and, in some cases, their masculinity, was in doubt. This ill-prepared us for the coming crisis in Vietnam -- never mind what it unfairly did to the people involved -- plunging the United States into a civil war it little understood if only because the people who did had been purged from government service.

I sit in uncomprehending awe of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. I was a military man myself, if basic and advanced training in the combat engineers count for anything, and therefore I lived in barracks with gays. That's a statistical certainty. Later in life I belonged to several health clubs where, statistics aside, I damn well knew that many of the members were gay. In all that time, I had not a single uncomfortable moment. This is not something that, for instance, women at West Point and the Air Force Academy could say. In both military institutions, women have been molested and even raped. Yet no one suggests getting rid of women . . . or men -- just making the system work. This should be the rule with heterosexuals and homosexuals as well.

Fat chance, though. Homophobia has become entrenched because gays have become the personification of modernity, particularly changing sexual mores. So much of cultural conservatism has to do with sex -- abortion, marriage, sex education, celibacy -- that it makes sense that those who are the most outré, the greatest taboo breakers of them all, are the most loathed. This is why it is important for social conservatives to insist that homosexuality is a choice -- a casual one, at that -- and not something determined at birth or shortly thereafter. That valuable piece of ignorance justifies homophobia since, in America, you can no longer hate what someone is, only what they have become. The element of choice is as essential as it is fictitious.

In the many reviews I've read of the new book claiming Abraham Lincoln was gay, the same disclaimer appears over and over again: It wouldn't matter if he was. I take this as an affirmation of historic truth -- the slaves would still have been freed, the Civil War both fought and won -- but also as an assertion of blasé tolerance: Who cares? It wouldn't change a thing.

But these reviewers are right in a way I don't think they intended. Even if Lincoln had been gay, even if the book "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" by C.A. Tripp had received mostly respectful reviews instead of general dismissal, it still would not matter. America would be as reluctant to face the prospect that one of its greatest presidents was gay as it once was to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson fathered a child with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. It would be dismissed, belittled -- treated in the conservative community much as evolution is today. Facts do not matter when faith is at stake. Fire the gay linguists.

Inshallah!