Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
Yesterday Congress finally repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military. This move has both small and big implications.
It is small in the sense that it affects a small segment of the population (gay people in the military) and eliminating this rule will not cost any money or changes in the way the military is run or affect the nation in any noticeable way. It will not be long before people wonder (if they remember it at all) what all the fuss was about, why we had such an absurd rule in the first place, and why it was so hard to eliminate it.
But this change is big in a symbolic sense, and should give a boost to efforts to obtain full equal rights for gays in all areas of society. When the government condones discrimination in one of its major institutions, it gives ammunition to all the homophobes who want to deny gays their rights in other areas. So the long-term significance of this repeal should not be underestimated. It may well symbolize the beginning of the end for anti-gay discrimination in the US.
But this high profile debate illustrates another feature. The one-party oligarchic state that we have in the US cannot be too obvious about its monolithic nature. It needs hot-button issues that the oligarchy does not care about (sexuality, abortion, guns, religion, etc.) that the two factions can strongly disagree on and fight over, and which serve to give us the illusion that we have two opposing parties instead of two factions of the same party. This allows for heated fights and gives each faction’s supporters the impression that they are winning some battles and losing others, when in reality, the oligarchy is winning on all the major issues. So repeal of DADT gives supporters of the Democratic faction something to feel good about and to rally around their leaders.
But even allowing for that, the repeal of DADT is to be welcomed and congratulations extended to all those who fought so hard for it.
In these dark days I’ll take good news wherever I can find it, and this was very welcome news.
Juan Cole worries that the focus of right-wing bigotry will now shift with even greater force onto the Muslim world. Read more here.
We have already seen incoming House committee chairmen promise an Inquisition, sorry “investigation,” into terror cells in the American Muslim community. This serves the dual purpose of reinforcing irrational fears of domestic terrorism and giving the ignorant someone else to hate, distracting them from the destruction of their own country by the very forces who profess to protect it.
As we journey back to the McCarthy era, it’s sobering to realize that in the 1950s we at least had a genuinely progressive tax code. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when we cherry-picked from history, we picked the concepts that actually worked?