Obama will end 'don't ask' policy, aide says

CPT Michael Gerold founder of San Francisco American Legion Post 911 stands with Matthew Shea post 911 Adjutant outside their offices at the War Memorial Veterans Building Tuesday Jan 13, 2009 CPT Michael Gerold founder of San Francisco American Legion Post 911 stands with Matthew Shea post 911 Adjutant outside their offices at the War Memorial Veterans Building Tuesday Jan 13, 2009 Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Obama will end 'don't ask' policy, aide says 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

President Obama will end the 15-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy that has prevented homosexual and bisexual men and women from serving openly within the U.S. military, a spokesman for the president-elect said.

Obama said during the campaign that he opposed the policy, but since his election in November he has made statements that have been interpreted as backpedaling. On Friday, however, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, responding on the transition team's Web site to a Michigan resident who asked if the new administration planned to get rid of the policy, said:

"You don't hear politicians give a one-word answer much. But it's 'Yes.' "

The little-noticed response, made in a video posted on change.gov, made barely a ripple outside blogs focused on the gay community, but that's not surprising, said those who have been pushing to overturn the ban. Not only was Obama's position expected, they said, but support for reviewing or repealing the policy has grown markedly in recent years, including some from unexpected quarters.

The end of "don't ask, don't tell" might not happen immediately, several critics of the policy said. Although they appreciate clarity from Obama on the issue, they anticipate that the demands of the economy and two wars are likely to trump a speedy policy reversal.

"The question isn't if we do it, and the question isn't when we do it, it's how we do it," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, whose 2006 bill to repeal the ban earned broad support among Democrats in Congress but did not move forward in the face of a near-certain veto by President Bush.

"I'm going to reintroduce the bill in the next few weeks," Tauscher said. "We've got the American people behind us."

Changing attitudes

An ABC poll in July found that three-quarters of Americans supported allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military compared to 44 percent of Americans who expressed the same support in 1993, when President Bill Clinton approved "don't ask, don't tell" as what he called an "honorable compromise" that nevertheless bitterly disappointed his supporters in the gay community.

Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., both of whom backed the 1993 policy, recently called for it to be re-evaluated. John Shalikashvili, who followed Powell as chairman, has called for its repeal, as has former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr, an opponent of gay rights and legal protections for gays. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Barr disparaged the policy as wasting money and talent.

The current leaders of the military, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have neither supported nor opposed ending the policy in recent comments, saying pointedly that Congress and the president make the laws; the military follows them.

Recently, the main active support for "don't ask, don't tell" has come from the nonprofit Center for Military Readiness, whose founder, Elaine Donnelly, and other officers did not respond to requests for comment.

Donnelly has argued that ending the ban on gays serving openly in the military would devastate unit cohesion and morale by ordering heterosexual troops into "forced cohabitation" with openly gay and lesbian troops. But critics of the policy say society has changed since "don't ask, don't tell" was implemented to address similar concerns.

"We had a decade in the 1990s where people came out, and people came to know that their sisters and their mothers and their colleagues and their children and their friends were gay," said Nathaniel Frank, a senior research fellow with the Palm Center at UC Santa Barbara, which conducts research on sexual minorities in the military.

"Familiarity breeds tolerance and even acceptance."

More recent years have seen high-profile discharges of gay Arabic linguists and other troops whose military jobs were deemed essential in Iraq, Afghanistan and the "war on terror" - dismissals that struck many people as inexplicable, said sociologist Melissa Embser-Herbert, author of "The U.S. Military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Policy: A Reference Handbook."

"We know of gay, lesbian, bisexual veterans who have served in combat theater, and I think that's also a big piece of it," she said. "It's a much harder sell to the general public that that person who died or lost a leg didn't deserve to be serving their country."

The military also has experienced a shift in attitudes, according to a number of studies. A 2006 Zogby International poll found military members who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan to be split on the issue, with about a quarter saying gays should be able to serve openly and a bit more than a third saying they should not.

But about a quarter of respondents said they knew a gay person already serving in the military, and a large majority of those - about two-thirds - said the presence of a gay person in their unit made no impact on their personal or their unit's morale. Three-quarters said they would have joined the military even if gays were permitted to serve openly.

A more recent, if unscientific, readership survey by the Military Times group of newspapers reported that about 58 percent of active-duty respondents opposed repealing the ban, a number that was cited in some media accounts as reflecting broad military opposition to a change.

But the newspapers that conducted the poll warned that their readers were not a perfect mirror of the military - they were more likely to be older, male, careerists, officers and politically conservative. In that context, sociologist Embser-Herbert said, it is remarkable that the level of opposition was not higher, because it is the younger, enlisted troops who are more likely to favor allowing gays to serve openly.

'Will and Grace' generation

"It's the 'Will and Grace' generation," she said. "They've grown up seeing gay people on TV and having friends in 10th-grade come out."

In the 1980s, when John Caldera was a Navy hospital corpsman, "don't ask, don't tell" was not yet policy, but was practice. Caldera, a gay man now a member of the San Francisco Veterans Commission, recalled how any sailor whose medical problem was diagnosed as HIV would be sequestered in a ward to await the inevitable investigation of presumed homosexuality and likely discharge.

"The policy ... should have never been created," he said. "With this new administration, I look for the light at the end of the tunnel."

Today, Caldera is one of several gay veterans in American Legion District 8 in San Francisco whose commander, Michael Gerold, a veteran injured in a firefight in Afghanistan, appointed an openly gay veteran as district finance officer without hesitation.

"He's an Iraq-Afghanistan veteran. It's just not an issue. Core competencies and leadership, that's what I need," he said. "I don't give a darn about the rest."

Another legion officer, Matt Shea, chief of staff of American Legion Post 911, recalled deploying to Iraq with a friend and fellow squad leader who later came out to him.

"It's about competence, about being able to do your job. He was a better leader than most, took care of his guys better than most I'd seen," said Shea. "Who ... cares? Seriously."