The mood in many quarters of the LGBT community is jubilant today, after President Barack Obama signed a bill this morning repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to cheers of “USA! USA!” and “Enlist us now!”
Along with the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, a champion of the repeal effort, received standing ovations at the signing ceremony at the Interior Department headquarters in Washington D.C. Even Senator Harry Reid, long vilified by many LGBT political commentators for seemingly risking the fate of the repeal effort with his political tactics, is being proclaimed a hero for those same delays and risky votes.
However, this doesn’t mean that every LGB servicemember can bust open closet this afternoon, and not just because Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and at least one Virginia state legislator want to try to ban LGB Americans from the Virginia National Guard in a fit of Tenth Amendment pique. The US military still has to officially change its own DADT-based regulations, and train officers and enlisted personel in on what the new rules are following the law’s repeal, and like any large bureaucracy, it moves more slowly than any President’s pen.
There are a few clues, though, as to what a post-DADT military will look like for LGB servicemembers (numerous regulations still prohibit openly transgender Americans from enlisting in the military and make open service difficult for transgender servicemembers), courtesy of recommendations from the Pentagon Working Group’s year-long study of how to carry out a repeal.
After eliminating the regulations mandating a discharge for “homosexual conduct,” the report directs the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force to make sure policies regarding public displays of affection (PDA), dress and appearance, unprofessional relationships, and harassment are updated to be “sexual orientation neutral,” and explicitly ban harassment, discrimination, and, interestingly, “sex stereotyping” based on sexual orientation
Responding to concerns from some evangelical Christian chaplains that they would not want to minister to openly LGB servicemembers, the report recommends military leaders re-affirm the principle that a unit’s chaplain is required to minister to everyone in the unit – whether they are Bahá’í or bisexual. Under the working group’s recommendations, commanders would also be reminded of the consequences of failing to take action on claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation.
While successive heads of the Marine Corps have said they believe LGB troops should shower and sleep separately from straight troops, the report recommended agains this, and against letting servicemembers leave the military if they couldn’t handle serving oposite an out LGB colleague.
Lastly, while the federal Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the Pentagon from recognizing troops’ same-gender partners as a couple, servicemembers will be allowed to designate unmarried partners as recipients of their benefits, as in any straight, unmarried domestic partnership.
No timeline appears to have been set for the implementation for these regulations, although the much-derided, year-long, Pentagon-directed study has produced a rough facsimile of what they will look like. However, activists seem hopeful that the Pentagon will move quickly on the issue.
“While we now await certification and the transition regulations,” the Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network head Alexander Nicholson said in a press statement issued this morning, “we call upon the senior defense leadership to hasten the implementation of this policy change internally. The U.S. military will certainly be better off as a result.”
“The Pentagon ought to be able to pull them off faster than it did the implementation of DADT in 1994, which took approximately 40 days,” the Palm Center said in a news release, quoting a report the Center released earlier this year.