Telling About Gay Warriors and Asking for Votes

Telling About Gay Warriors and Asking for Votes
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/opinion/09fri4.html?th&emc=th


As the chief House whip fighting to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays serving in the military, Representative Patrick Murphy will never be dismissed as a naïve idealist.

Wearing his paratrooper lapel pin, the husky lawmaker beards colleagues to speak firsthand of his combat time in Iraq and Bosnia and the good men and women he saw drummed from service. He tells of his days teaching constitutional law at West Point, where eventually some cadets would privately inquire whether it would be best to out themselves and give up career hopes in such an intolerant military.

“I told them, ‘No, you become an officer and do what you need to do,’ ” the Pennsylvania Democrat related emphatically as he made his home district rounds this week. “We don’t need them to be sacrificial lambs.”

Help is on the way, the former Capt. Murphy tells gay and lesbian soldiers. The Obama administration has begun ratcheting back a policy that let accusers operate oath-free from the shadows to help drive more than 13,000 from the services in the 17 years since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was enacted by Congress in a frenzied battle of the culture war.

And in gathering votes for its repeal, Mr. Murphy has upped the co-sponsor tally by 40 in the past year to 191 and counting (including two Republicans). He gained a dozen new supporters last month when the ranking Pentagon brass endorsed repeal with the strong support of retired Gen. Colin Powell.

“That was very significant,” said Mr. Murphy, who is predicting he’ll have the needed 216-vote majority in time to add repeal onto the huge defense authorization bill when it comes up next month. He is already conferring on strategy with Joseph Lieberman, the Senate’s repeal leader. Over in that chamber, the 60-vote filibuster barrier could be turned back onto opponents as the minimum they would need to strike repeal from the defense bill.

In contrast to the political bombast of the culture wars, Representative Murphy’s appeal in working for the support of his colleagues is rich in detail on how the issue plays out in the military at what are called Chapter 15 hearings.

“Imagine, we have thousands of administrative hearings just to determine whether or not someone is gay or straight,” he said, “when these good soldiers should be focused on missions like killing Osama bin Laden.”

One of his accused buddies in a Chapter 15 had to offer a privacy-shredding defense in which he called forth an inamorata from his unit. “She testified that, yes, they slept together, and, yes, he’s not gay,” said Mr. Murphy, with that only-in-the-Army shrug of a true veteran.

Above his paratrooper pin, it helps that Mr. Murphy bears the face of an altar boy. When fellow Irish Catholics ask how a family man like himself with two children can take the lead for gays and lesbians, his sales pitch will mention that he was Altar Boy of the Month in 1987 back in his hometown parish.

Other doubters, including House members worried about being demagogued, ask why this issue is being pushed now, with so much on the national agenda. He says national defense and plain justice demand it: “Now is the exact time to do it. We desegregated the military during the Korean War when half the nation was still racially segregated.”

When Mr. Murphy talks about how the Army should be dealing with this issue, he likes to tell the story of a goldbrick who wanted to “tell” so he could shirk his duties. “This guy didn’t want to deploy to Bosnia in ’98, and so he announced to me that he was gay,” Mr. Murphy recalled. “I said, ‘That’s great, but have a good time deploying with the First Armored Division on behalf of our country.’ ”