by Patrick Appel
As far as I can tell, this is the very first piece of pro-gay legislation that is not attached to any other piece of legislation making its way through both chambers of the U.S. Congress on its way to the President’s desk. Please correct me if I’m overlooking something, but I cannot think of any other federal pro-LGBT legislative accomplishment that has been achieved through a straight up-or-down vote as a stand-along bill.
Dahlia Lithwick smacks Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) for claiming, without a scrap of evidence, that DADT repeal "could cost lives":
What Kyl seems prepared to ignore is that also as a result of this long overdue piece of legislation, people may live. If we’ve learned anything else from Dan Savage’s astonishing It Gets Better project, it’s that there are indeed life-and-death consequences to telling gay teenagers that they are second class, or shameful, or disgusting. And a military policy that legally enshrined such humiliation -- a policy that allowed soldiers to die for their country so long as they lived in shame or silence -- was nothing if not government-sanctioned intolerance. As Jason Linkins explains, one of the reasons President Clinton first sought to end discrimination against gays serving openly in the military was because of the violent abuse (and even murder) they suffered at the hands of other servicemen. The lives of young gay Americans who may now feel pride in living openly may not count in Kyl’s vague calculus of lives lost, but they should.
Nate Silver reads the roll call:
There are, in the lame duck session, 11 Republican senators from states that President Obama carried in 2008. Of these, 7 voted with the Democrats to repeal the policy, while 3 voted against it. (One other the retiring Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire did not vote at all.)
By contrast, right there are now 31 Republican senators from states that Senator John McCain won in 2008. Just one of these Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted to repeal the ban on gay servicemembers. Another 28 voted against it, and two did not vote.
Jason Kuznicki criticizes the timing:
One thing that history won’t remember, but that will certainly be true, is that the Democrats chose the single moment in all the possible permutations of the election cycle when it would cost them the very least when an election has just been held, when it costs the least in their own members’ cushy seats, when many of them are leaving anyway, and when they can spend the next two years complaining about an agenda not of their own making. Still, well done.
David Link, on the other hand, applauds Obama for taking the path of least resistance:
When Clinton promised he would resolve the problem of gays in the military with the stroke of a pen, he gave Sam Nunn an engraved invitation to visit those infamous submarine bunks, and paved the way for Republicans to invoke the most fearsome set of showers since World War II.
This is the kind of political problem that can best be solved more indirectly. There was no doubt about the public support for repeal, and while there was concern about how the troops would view it, that turned out to be based on the same wishful thinking by the right as everything else in the area of gay equality. But even in the face of genuine popular support, the equally genuine, gut-level ugliness of the minority also has to be negotiated.
That is Obama’s real triumph, and he proved to be quite right about how you approach the problem.
I'm thrilled about the repeal of DADT and didn't think it would happen. It was skillfully done. And on a grander scale, I'm surprised at how well he's managed the press, which I didn't believe was possible. For the most part I think he's really figured out how to keep them happy and that's no mean feat. Remember, Clinton offended them even when he was passing GOP policies, so it's as much a matter of style as substance. I think they've skillfully managed to keep them where they want them and that's very helpful in navigating public opinion in hard times.
Reading around mainstream traditional media coverage this morning, I notice a lot of emphasis on the discrimination/second-class citizens/Obama fulfilling a promise to a core constituency, the gays. Let’s not forget that ending this policy will start to strengthen our military the way it has strengthened armed services in other countries. 14,000 discharged. We have to recruit former convicted felons, people who perhaps aren’t as sharp educationally speaking as those who were discharged. We’ve wasted billions on discharge investigations and court-martials. While people like McCain were grandstanding on and on about unit cohesion, disrupting a unit by kicking out a member over an e-mail from his boyfriend back home sure sounds like disrupting cohesion to me. Sure, discrimination must be ended, but there are two aspects of why this is good for America.
Among the consequences: this removes the last stated objection to the return of ROTC programs to on-campus operations at Harvard and some other elite universities. I've discussed the background extensively, starting here and here. ROTC left these campuses four decades ago because of bitter disagreements over the Vietnam war. That's long in the past; since the early 1990s, the main argument against ROTC's return has been the military's exclusion of openly gay members.
Steve Benen was saddened by McCain antics:
This isn't another "Whatever happened to the old McCain?" piece, which we've all seen too many times in recent years. Rather, this is to suggest McCain has done more than make the transition from "maverick" to petulant right-winger. Yesterday, the man waving his arms on the Senate floor was a misanthropic hack who's abandoned basic decency, and trashed any hopes he might have had about a respectable legacy.
As was Ta-Nehisi:
We have, of late, taken to avoiding comparisons between the struggles of gays and the struggles of blacks. And yet, in this instance, the notion that DADT is actually a Georgetown cocktail party plot, surely recalls the notion that "Lincolnism" is actually the work of miscegenaters. The case is different, but the disinclination to argue on the grounds of facts, the proclivity for changing the subject, the penchant for deceitful ad-hominem, and the bigoted appeal to fear, is the same as it ever was.
Lieberman ... played an important role as a public counterbalance to John McCain, whose quixotic, erratic and desperate efforts to stall and defeat repeal might have commanded more public respect, were it not for Lieberman's high-profile campaign. Lieberman's independent status and Beltway reputation as a hawk made him perfect for the lead role in undercutting McCain's arguments. He succeeded in doing this in scores of TV interviews and at the Senate hearings, where he cross-examined military leaders inclined against repeal and got them to acknowledge that they could live with repeal if it were implemented by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In a sense, this has been an old-school epic battle between two senators. Lieberman won.
More Republicans voted for repeal than expected, but this vote can and should be remembered as a moment when the Democratic Party lived up to its finest traditions as the party of tolerance and the Republican Party was willing to invoke its procedural rights in the name of denying fundamental rights to others. The DREAM Act and DADT repeal votes were about more than just policy--they were mission statements for what each party stands for.
All of this was inconceivable seventeen years ago, and it raises the question of what this means for the future of social conservatism, or at least for the importance of so-called “social issues” in American politics. Social issues played almost no role in the 2010 midterms, for example, and their role in the 2008 elections was minimal at best. This is a dramatic shift from the early 80s when abortion played a huge role in election campaigns around the country, especially when the Supreme Court issued one of its many rulings from that era testing the limits of the holding in Roe v. Wade.
[T]his issue will now promptly go away, entirely. Oh, we'll have a bit of reporting on implementation, but seriously: does anyone think that Republicans are going to run in 2012 on re-instating DADT? Or, even less plausibly, on re-instating the ban that DADT replaced? Forget it. It's possible to believe that a DADT vote could be used in a GOP primary down the road, but it's utterly implausible to believe that the policy would ever be revived, no matter what happens in the 2012 (or any future cycle) elections.
Julian Sanchez tweets:
Prediction: DOMA lasts until the first spouse of a gay soldier killed in action gets denied survivor benefits.
Andrew's heart-felt reaction here.