After initially refusing to oust Lt. Robin Chaurasiya after she came out to her commanding officers, the Air Force will, in fact, move ahead with a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell dismissal.
It was the most bizarre expression of DADT we’ve seen: Military branches regularly kick out known gay soldiers, but because Chaurasiya made her sexuality known and wanted to leave service (because, she said, she couldn’t serve in the military that refused to serve her), she was denied an exit after Lt. Gen. Robert R. Allardice, Chaurasiya’s commander at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois concluded she was faking her gayness (and her civil union) just to get out.
Except on Monday, the Air Force reversed its decision after Gen. Raymond E. Johns Jr., described as a “more senior officer,” looked into the case and recommended a discharge. Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley, who has said it’s time to repeal DADT, has the final say.
And that’s the sickest part of all this: As we’re seeing, gay soldiers can get out of military service just by declaring their sexuality, which is something no soldier, arguably, should be able to do. (They enlist, and it’s a binding contract.) So now gays have, in one sense, a special privilege all their own. Unless you see gay soldiers’ inability to serve their country proudly and openly as the privilege — or rather the right — so many desperately prefer.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Sam
It’s a horrifically unfair rule, but at least she’s getting out like she wanted.
Are we ever going to repeal this piece-of-crap legislation? Are we going to get to the point where, like, 99% of soldiers and civilians are opposed to DADT and it’s still not repealed because the Democrats are convinced it’s still a “controversial” issue and the Republicans will try to make it into one just to win the news cycle? Why am I even bothering to ask? Of course we are.
james_cambridge
This is such an important issue so is it wrong that all I can concentrate on is her acne? Can someone send some proactive to whatever base she’s stationed at please??
Joey
@james_cambridge: No, sir, I suppose it’s not technically wrong to be a Douche-bag with extra used dirty water. It’s easy to be nice; It’s even easier to be a total asshole…which in your case you are.
Michael @ LeonardMatlovich.com
I’m sorry but it isn’t quite as simple as “declaring you’re gay” and getting out.
Yes, there are endless variations because of the autonomy given individual commanders across a force of roughly 1.4 million active duty servicemembers and another 800,000 reservists.
But, officially, DADT implementation rules mandate an investigation to determine if the claim is valid. Remember Anthony Woods, the African-American West Point grad and Iraqi veteran who ran for Congress from CA last year.
After the told his commander he was gay, they investigated him for six months before discharging him.
The military has played stop-loss games when it suited them going all the way back to World War II. But just referencing the post DADT passage period, this is from a Palm Center report:
“Three days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, President Bush signed executive order #13223 that authorized the individual service branches to initiate a “stop-loss,” which
allowed them “to suspend certain laws relating to promotion, involuntary retirement, and separation” of military personnel. Some of the media erroneously reported that the military had “suspended” discharges of homosexuals, which it had not. The document order allowed individual branches to halt discharges, but it did not order them to do so. On September 24,
according to The Advocate magazine, the Air Force suspended some discharges, but exempted gay discharges from the suspension, instructing leaders to continue such discharges. On October 2, the Navy followed suit.
Despite the exemptions for homosexuals, a Pentagon spokesman said that while “administrative discharges (medical, hardship, suitability) could continue under stop loss, commanders would be given enough latitude in this area to apply good judgment and
balance the best interests of the service, the unit and the individual involved.”
An army document, Milper Message Number 04-169 issued June 2, 2004 explicitly exempted from stop-loss “those soldier in violation of the Army’s homosexual conduct policy.” This meant anyone who had been determined to have violated “don’t ask, don’t tell” would be discharged. Yet evidence shows that the Army was able to subvert its own regulation simply by
neglecting to pursue homosexual conduct violations until they had already sent avowed homosexuals to war.
In 2005, Palm Center researchers obtained an Army Commander’s
Handbook updated in 1999 and still in effect. In the handbook, entitled, “Regulation 500-3-3 Volume III, Reserve Component Unit Commanders Handbook, in Table 2.1 on “Personnel actions during the mobilization process,” it says under the criterion of
“homosexuality”: “if discharge is not requested prior to the unit’s receipt of alert notification, discharge isn’t authorized. Member will enter AD [active duty] with the
unit.”
After the handbook was discovered and publicized, a military spokesperson acknowledged that the Pentagon was sending openly gay service members into combat in Iraq. Kim Waldron, of the U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, said that,
“The bottom line is some people are using sexual orientation to avoid deployment. So in this case, with the Reserve and Guard forces, if a soldier ‘tells,’ they still have to go to war
and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S. and the unit is demobilized.”
The highest number of DADT discharges in any given year was the first year Bush fils was in office. But they began to fall with our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan so that by 2008 they were only HALF of what they were then reflecting the stop-loss choices described above.
Vellum
Ah, the ridiculousness. I got out because I wanted to, but I wanted to leave mostly because of ill treatment.
Anyway, I highly doubt that significant numbers of heterosexual service people are trying to get themselves kicked out this way. I have talked with a number of people in the armed forces who want out. I suggest two things – DADT or become a conscientious objector.
The second is harder to get and takes longer, but most people refuse to try and get out on the DADT. For one thing, everyone wants to know why a person has left the service, and it is pretty easy for people to break the rules and find out. For another, the DD214, the paper that proves a person was in the service and left, marks down ‘homosexual admission,’ ‘homosexual act’ or something similar as the reason for their leaving. If a person wants to prove military service to an employer, they have to show this paper.
John
Sorry, but in NONE of the dozen or so jobs I have held since getting out of the military, has ANYONE, EVER asked me the nature of my discharge or to see my DD-214.
Supporter
what about the financial obligation? ROTC? Whether gay or straight, a promise is a promise.