Reply #6: There was a large cadre WITHIN the military that wanted to make it happen.

[MADem]

This is not well known but it's the truth. The people who wanted it to happen weren't terribly "pro-gay" (if there's such a thing). In fact, some of them were homophobic-ish, in their daily lives with the snarky 'faggot' jokes and so forth.

Here's what many of the senior leaders who supported the change had in common--the loss of one (often more) of their best workers due to someone 'outing' them or the worker outing him or herself. Many, too, had memories of looking at their PCS funds outlay and their manning documents and gapped billets, noting that a stupid amount of money was spent getting rid of 'those people' and a bunch of billets were gapped, and work was done less efficiently, as a result.

It was a bunch of fucking "manly" GOP freaks in the Congress who really hardassed the whole business; some of the staffers were absolutely rabid. And the DADT WAS the best we could get, though there was a push at the outset to just flat-out change the rule and that would be that. We realized that was a non-starter, pretty fast, though, so we proposed starting out with DADT, see how it played, and then go to a "You can tell if you want, but don't be making a big deal out of it--be professional at work and don't be going on and on about your private life, no matter what your orientation."

Unfortunately, we are still stuck on DADT, and it's just a stupid rule. It continues to waste personnel and resources, and it puts gay service personnel in a quandry, trapped between a life that's bullshit on the one hand, an insistence on integrity on the other. It's a schizo existence for them, and unfair.