Top Marine Wants to Keep Ban on Gays While Afghan War Rages
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Tom Diemer
CorrespondentThe new commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps says the don't ask, don't tell policy barring gays from serving openly in the military should stay in place while the nation remains in the heat of war in Afghanistan.
"There's risk involved. I'm trying to measure that risk," Gen. James Amos said in an Associated Press report. "This is not a social thing. This is combat effectiveness. that's what the country pays its Marines to do."
The current policy, which says the military will not pry into a service member's personal lives if he keeps his sexual orientation private, has been overturned by a U.S. District Court in California. But an Appeals court issued a stay of the lower court order, so the policy remains in effect. A gay rights group, the Log Cabin Republicans, has asked the Supreme Court to take the case.
In the meantime, the Senate could vote to repeal the don't ask, don't tell law when it returns later this month. President Obama favors repeal and the U.S. House has already approved legislation to end the rule. But there is some Republican opposition and that party now has a stronger hand on Capitol Hill, although it will remain a minority in the Senate in the lame duck session and in the new Congress.
General Amos said repeal could have unique consequences for the Marine Corps, which typically quarters two people in each room to promote unity. "There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women – and when you talk of infantry, we're talking young men -- laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers," Amos said. "I don't know what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that's what we're looking at. It's unit cohesion, it's combat effectiveness."
Amos began his assignment last month. President Obama plans to begin reducing troop strength in Afghanistan next July, if conditions allow for it.
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While I was in the Marine Corps {85 to 89}, I never heard that sharing rooms was to promote "unity".
When I first joined, there were squad huts and then there were 4 man rooms and later it was 2 man rooms. All were run down pieces of shit that that would be condemned in the real world. Oddly enough, they did start building new housing units, but the women got them, go figure.
Oh yeah, I lived in a fucking GP tent for a year in Yechon South Korea, at the end of a fucking runway.
