On Tuesday, September 20th, 2011, the statute known as Don't Ask, Don't Tell will no longer be the law of the United States. This should mark a triumphant day for an administration currently besieged by bad economic and political news. After all, no major legislation or policy that the administration has pushed has come close to being as popular as the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Yet the day is likely to come and go with little fanfare. I will do my best not to let that happen, little though that can be.
This is the second part of the story of repeal, from the viewpoint of one Kossack, yours truly, sitting at his computer as history unfolded, advocating away for repeal on the backpages of Daily Kos. The first part, The Ecstasy and the Agony, provides a more extensive introduction, a complete timeline, and covers events that took place through 2009.
Update: The third part is now published.
Update: The fourth part is now published.
Protests and Handcuffs and Senators, Oh My!
As the President's 2010 State of the Union speech approached, rumors beget rumors. "Would he, or wouldn't he?" Include a statement advocating repeal of
Don't Ask, Don't Tell this year, that is.
His advisors thought he should. His advisors thought he shouldn't. He wanted to. He didn't want to. A few days before the speech it became clear that the President would include a mention, though exactly what he would say was unknown. And then, on January 27th, 2010, history was made.
"This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."
"Yes! (And about time, I might add!)" I thought.
In an obviously orchestrated followup, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) held a hearing on Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal shortly thereafter and on February 2nd took testimony from Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Admiral Mullen's testimony carried the day, making Republican opponents of repeal on the committee look like they wanted to crawl under their podiums.
"It is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do... I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution."
The world cheered. Well, at least the 70% of Americans who wanted the policy gone and most of the rest of the industrialized world anyway. The highest ranking member of the US Military and the Secretary of Defense were telling Congress to repeal the damned law. That was what everyone, Republicans like John McCain included, were waiting for, or so they had said. Except they were lying.
Yet nothing happened.
A month and a half later, with frustration again rising, Robin McGehee and Kip Williams formed GetEqual, an organization devoted to protests and civil disobedience for LGBT rights.
Enough, as it were, was enough. If being patient, if being "Mr. Nice Gay" was not working (if it ever had), then other tactics needed to be employed. Dan Choi and GetEqual became the new faces, quickly allied, of a movement that traced its roots back to the Stonewall Riots. It was a marriage (legal in all 50 states) of two fighters made, if not in heaven, then out of the cloth of necessity.
On March 18th Dan Choi and Dan Petrangelo handcuffed themselves to the White House fence.
On April 19th, GetEqual activists heckled President Obama about DADT at a fundraiser for Senator Boxer.
On April 20th, Choi and Petrangelo once again shackled themselves to the White House fence along with Sandeen, Boyd, Thomas, and Whitt.
They were starting to be noticed.
Meanwhile the bureaucracy was responding to renewed calls for action on repeal. Badly. On April 6th Secretary Gates announced what many perceived to be the death of meaningful action, a "year long" study on how best to implement repeal. Some observed that candidate Obama had famously suggested in the Presidential debates that the quickest way to kill a good idea was to send it to a committee for study. The administration announced that it did not want any action on a repeal bill until the study was complete.
A strange thing then happened. Democrats in Congress began to ignore the administration's wishes. Accepted wisdom had it that the way to get a DADT repeal bill through Congress was to attach it to the Defense Authorization Bill (DAB), a yearly bill that kept the Defense Department cooking, and which Republicans would dare not vote against. Pressure began to build to do just that.
All eyes, including those of us here on Daily Kos, began focusing on the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the committee responsible for the DAB. A grassroots campaign arose to determine which Senators on that committee supported repeal, and of those who didn't, who was persuadable. It was going to be close.
Our first victory came on April 12th as documented in Great News! Senator McCaskill now favors DADT repeal. A DADT diary noticed by a McCaskill staffer had prompted the staffer to make public the Senator's position!
On April 16th, Senator Hagan announced her support for repeal.
On April 26th, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network began its Letters to the President Series, reprinted with additional commentary on Daily Kos by Scott Wooledge, aka clarknt67. Here is one such diary. Day after day for several weeks poignant letters from current and former servicemembers who suffered because of DADT were printed and sent to the President and various members of Congress.
With momentum building, on April 30th Secretary Gates sent a letter to SASC Chairman Carl Levin effectively demanding that no action on repeal be taken until the study was done. Chairman Levin was not amused:
We're not a rubber stamp for the president... He says he wants to repeal 'dont ask.' Why shouldn't we repeal it?
Up and down went the hypothetical vote count, back and forth went the rhetoric, but as a crucial end-of-May vote approached, repeal still lacked at least one, and likely two, votes. On May 25th, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said he would support repeal.
Who knows what really went on in those final days? But perhaps, just perhaps, seeing the writing on the wall, the administration begin negotiating furiously with Gates on one side, Senators on the committee on the other and fired up repeal advocates on yet a third side, putting together a deal. DADT repeal, watered down, without an equal protection clause, with a certification requirement and a Senator Byrd imposed 60-day delay after certification, would be inserted into the DAB. It was, and on May 27th, the committee voted for the legislation.
The crowd, as they say, went wild. Then wondered what would happen next.