A recent Gallup poll reveals that 25% of Americans do not believe in "allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military". And 70% think they should be allowed to do so.
Let's think about that.
Barack Obama won the Presidency 53% - 46%, a margin of 7%. DADT repeal wins by a margin of 45% (70% - 25%), more than six times as broad. It's probably impossible to find any issue of popular concern where the margin of difference is so decisive.
Consider:
The people who do not support DADT repeal are likely the same people who still supported George Bush after he lead us into the Iraq clusterfuck, spent us into oblivion without investing in anything useful, watched New Orleans drown and finally destroyed the economy. They are most of them the same people who would believe anything as long as it comes out of Sarah Palin's mouth.
In other words, it doesn't get better than this. Hell, 25% of Americans would probably support a bill to outlaw oxygen if Glen Beck told them oxidation was a socialist process.
So why isn't repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell a done deal, signed, sealed and delivered?
Good question. Here's some answers I came up with. Perhaps you can think of more.
(Almost) no one is affected. The policy directly affects a very small number of people, those who have been or potentially might be thrown out of the military. A miniscule percentage of those in uniform get thrown out each year, and 0.005% of the total US population has ever been tossed.
Squeaky wheels get grease. While the clamor for DADT repeal may seem tremendous if all one does is pay attention to LGBT blogs and Daily Kos, the issue hardly gets attention in the mainstream media. And it's extremely unlikely that there are hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of people calling and writing Congress and the White House about DADT repeal. If 70% of the US population supports repeal, perhaps one in ten thousand of those 200,000,000 has done anything about it. Rush Limbaugh can cause half a million calls to Congress. How many calls can Joe Solmonese (President of the Human Rights Campaign) cause?
Nothing is ever easy. It took more than 70 years for the suffragette movement to win women's right to vote. It took almost 100 years after a Civil War to establish a solid basis for the rights of African Americans. Passing a health care reform bill started 100 years ago, took the efforts of millions of Americans, and dominated the political scene for almost a year. Nothing is ever easy. Why should this be any different?
The military brass. Just as in 1993, when Clinton first proposed repeal, my guess is that the military upper echelons are still dead set against repeal. Corporal Everyman may not care whether the person laying down covering fire to save his ass is gay, straight, male, female, Neandertal or Vulcan, but they still care. Corporate boardrooms may still be an old boys network, but my guess is the military is the ultimate straight old men's club.
The religious right. DADT repeal is just the next step on the slippery slope to perdition, as far as they are concerned. And they are concerned. Oh, are they concerned. And they are lobbying. And throwing money around. And I'm guessing they far outnumber, outshout, and outspend repeal advocates.
The Founding Fathers. Okay, they'd probably be in favor of equality if they'd been born in our times. It's not that. What I mean is that they gave us the Senate, that bastion of unproportional representation. When Wyoming's Senators (each representing about 270,000 people) have as much say on DADT repeal as California's Senators (each representing 18,000,000 people), you're going to have problems on certain issues, and this is one of them. Not to mention the filibuster, yet another tool to perpetuate the power of small constituencies.
LGBT votes and money don't really matter.. The President is elected by a few swing states. Control of the Senate is decided by a few key races. And what party rules the House of Representatives is determined by around fifty districts, not 435. If not pushing DADT repeal costs Democrats a small number of votes in a Senate race in New York and Barbara Lee's House district in California, no one really gives a FF. But if not making DADT repeal happen gains Democrats a small number of votes in key states and key districts, that could mean the difference between Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid vs. Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell. Have the political wonks and polling gurus calculated this out to three decimal places and pronounced their verdict: DADT delay good; DADT repeal bad? Only David Axelrod knows for sure. But I'll bet he knows.
The classic: there are always more important things to do (and what are you going to do anyway, vote Republican?)
So what can be done?
With DADT repeal hanging by a thread and its fate decided in the next couple of weeks, it's a little late for strategic maneuvering. But if repeal fails now, the issue isn't going away. It will be back, possibly in December, possibly in next year's Defense Authorization Bill, possibly in 2013. And most of these problems apply as well to passing ENDA and DOMA repeal.
In the medium term, there's not much to be done about the Senate (save supporting the modification or repeal of the filibuster). As the military brass retire they will likely be replaced by others from the same straight old men's club. There's not much we can do to make the religious right less batshit insane. The political calculus is what it is, and, you know, are you really going to vote for a Republican who believes you are Satan's spawn instead of a Democrat who just wishes you would go away?
The things that could be improved upon from now to December, though, are making people care, making people notice, and making Senators and Representatives heed.
Imagine if, from the day in January the President said he would work with Congress to repeal DADT, major newspapers in the country had been running the Letters to the President series, which personalizes the tragic effects of Don't Ask, Don't Tell?
What if everyone knew about the soldier the military was so disgracefully using: 'shoving your dismissal papers in a drawer until the end of your Iraq tour'? If everyone know about Sgt. Cooper-Harris and how she was blackmailed and raped? I think DADT repeal would be in the Defense Authorization Bill now.
Lt. Choi chained himself to the White House fence just as the health care bill was coming to a final vote in the House. Oops. Later, six more veterans chained themselves to the White House fence on the day President Obama went to the Gulf, the oil spill dominating the news. Oops again. Imagine, if, from January on, there had been a well-orchestrated and well-timed set of events: civil disobedience, marches ands sitins, and these events had pushed the issue deeper into the national consciousness. I think DADT repeal would be in much better shape right now.
Imagine if, from January on, there had been a targeted campaign to contact key members of the Senate Armed Services Committee; to call and write key members of the House; organized across all the LGBT organizations and blogs, in conjunction with other progressive organizations like the Courage Campaign, the DFA, and Moveon.org? Instead of pretty much starting up a month ago. Perhaps the one or two votes that are lacking on the SASC would be there.
And imagine if every Democratic Representative had already received notice from hundreds of past contributors, cc:ed to Nancy Pelosi, that no contributions would be forthcoming until DADT repeal passed the House? Perhaps, just perhaps, that vote would have already been taken.
There's still time to influence Congress on DADT repeal and ENDA, but just barely.
So there's the rub. There are some things that can't be changed, at least in the short or medium run, and some things that can. The LGBT community could take steps to see that those things that can be changed, are. Will it? Or will the military still be tossing some of its finest soldiers in 2013, and people fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation?
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Here's links to the diaries containing the 11 Letters to President Obama that have been published so far. Read them, if you have no already done so, and weep.