My friends: President Barak Obama has announced that he intends to ask the Congress of the United States to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation involving the United States military.
I am inviting you to consider very carefully what your reaction is and what you think is appropriate for our military and to communicate your opinion directly to your congressional representatives. I am attaching here my appeal to Colorado Representative Doug Lamborn and Colorado Senators Mike Bennet and Mark Udall.
In response to President Barak Obama’s announcement that he will ask the Congress of the United States to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy involving the United States armed forces, I forward to you my own demand, as your constituent.
It is inconceivable to this American citizen that the government of the United States would repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” thus forcing the importation of our social pathologies into the one institution that represents and demands the highest level of personal responsibility and deportment. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has worked well enough in shielding the armed forces from debilitating political agendas incompatible with military service. They don’t need to have this additional burden foisted on them.
This change would violate that fundamental standard of personal discipline and efficiency that is so vital for the military to accomplish its mission. “Mission efficiency” is what drives every military member from fresh recruit to the highest command levels. Abolishing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” threshold of personal behavior would jeopardize the unit cohesion, team identity and interdependence that can be a matter of life and death in combat.
Nothing is more basic to military service and discipline than the ability to perform one’s position during wartime. Today we see women front-line soldiers unable to perform their combat roles because of pregnancies. When pulled from the ranks for this or any other debilitating condition, that person’s position must be filled by someone else, thus violating the most sacred requirement of military service – the ability to perform your job when your fellow soldiers need you to.
As a young junior officer in the U. S. Navy serving on combatant ships, I was assigned the collateral duty of serving as a Summary Court-martial, that being the lowest of the three categories of courts-martial underneath Special Court-martial and General Court-martial.
A typical offense under a Summary Court-martial was having a young sailor come down with the “clap,” with a typical punishment being loss of pay and a reduction in rating. This punishment was much less for moral reasons than for the practical reason that when a member of a ship’s company was unable to perform his duty for medical reasons, another crew member had to perform his job for him. I always required the young miscreant sailor to repeat to me this understanding.
Sexual promiscuity has always been enough of a problem within the military without encouraging more. By creating an artificial class of citizen, whether civilian or military, based on the person’s sexual “identity” and by legitimizing a specific behavior within the military is an immense disservice to the men and women who abide by certain minimal standards of deportment. By removing these standards, government is now telling all military members that their personal standards no longer matter. The discipline and maturity of our military men and women do not deserve to be held in such contempt.
The military is not the proper place for pandering to politically driven “equality” mandates. The United States armed forces must be held to a higher standard of “equality” than the equality that has come to represent in our society nothing more than the lowest common denominator of achievement and behavior.
There is no such thing as a “right” to join the United States armed forces. There never has been. Even during mandatory service occasioned by the military draft, the armed forces have required minimal levels of physical and mental abilities, subject to specific limitations as in “4F” or “conscientious objector” status.
All of us as American citizens have an obligation to think hard on what we think our military services are about and communicate that opinion to our Conressional representatives.
I call on you, Mr. Lamborn, to have the Congress of the United States treat the men and women of the armed forces with the dignity and respect that they deserve and leave in place “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Whitney Galbraith lives in Colorado Springs. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
