In the case of integrating African Americans into the military, President Truman ignored top brass reluctance based on the very same arguments now being made about gays. Why can't President Obama do the same? There comes a time when decisions need to be audacious.
The tragic fact is, in 2010, our military institution is so powerful with such a huge and sacrosanct budget and so bogged down in wars, it tends to tell its commander-in-chief what to do.
Diane Mazur, a legal expert at the University of California, likened DADT to a hot potato. "The potato has been passed around so many times that I think the grown-up in the room is going to be the federal courts."
The real issue with gays in the military
All the discussion about homosexuality in the military naturally made me think of those incredibly indecent photographs leaked from Abu Ghraib Prison back in 2004.
In December 2003, I was in the parking lot of Abu Ghraib Prison with a group of veteran and military family peace activists. We were requesting access to the prison.
Men watched us with binoculars from the watchtowers, and of course we were refused entry. We settled for talking with US soldiers outside the walls and some of the Iraqi women and children futilely trying to get in to see their sons, brothers or fathers.
I'll never forget a US army major who came out to check us out. He seemed completely frazzled, and I concluded he was a reservist in way over his head. Very un-officer-like, he had things scribbled all over his helmet liner. He was quite friendly, as if he was glad to talk to a sane person for a change.
"You would not believe what's going on in there," he told me.
"Try me," I said. He laughed.
We know the story by now. On the late shift a team of military police reservists were coached by CIA agents to "soften up" the Iraqi detainees for interrogation later by the CIA talent. Years later, it was revealed that over 70 percent of the men held in Abu Ghraib were innocent and just caught up in the intensity of the invasion.
This was the moment when Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush warriors realized their "shock and awe" invasion had fomented a surprisingly robust insurgency, and they were scared.
The photographs that the Bush and Obama administrations haven't censored show activities that can only be described as "homosexual" -- versus "gay," which is a political, lifestyle term. Men stripping other men naked and grinning giddily as they make the other men perform fake fellatio. A delighted soldier holding a phallic nightstick in front of a buck-naked man whose arms are held out wide like Christ on the cross. The man seems smeared with sh*t. Iraqi men in their cells are seen watching it all.
Feminists have always emphasized that rape is not a sexual crime it's a crime of power. OK. But still, it's a sexual act, albeit one establishing power over another. Taken as acts of power, the acts undertaken late at night in Abu Ghraib, while maybe not literally "rape," were certainly instances of homosexual degradation and humiliation.
Seymour Hersh reported that in 2003 at the point the insurgency was appearing in Iraq, a book titled The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, an Israeli, was making the rounds in the Pentagon. Of especial interest, he said, was the chapter, "The Realm Of Sex."
Masturbation and homosexuality are powerfully humiliating taboos in Arab culture, Patai writes. Hersh's point was that the things that occurred in Abu Ghraib forced masturbation and what can only be described as homosexual abuse were part of a plan hatched somewhere to humiliate and break down men so they might divulge information on the blossoming insurgency.
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