In a decision reflecting its current priorities, the Defense Department announced it is seeking service members who were given a dishonorable discharge under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy so it can change their military records to remove that black mark.
When it was enacted by Bill Clinton in 1994, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was praised by the Left for opening the door for homosexual and lesbian service members to serve in uniform as long as who they were sexually attracted to was kept private. That compromise was later viewed by the Left as Jim Crow-like discrimination, however, so the Pentagon announcement this week coincided with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” 12 years ago under President Barack Obama.
Tellingly, a CBS News story published this week takes credit for pushing the Pentagon to take action even though the story states LGBT military veterans have been allowed to request an honorable discharge since 2011. That process is difficult in the bureaucratic military, the news story said, so the Pentagon has agreed to “ease the burden” by reviewing the service records of service members going back to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and to decades before that.
The Pentagon is also creating a website to speed up that process, too.
National defense analyst Bob Maginnis, a retired U.S. Army colonel with the Family Research Council, says his first reaction to the Pentagon policy was elections have consequences. That's because this issue goes all the way back to Bill Clinton’s election in 1993 and then includes two more military-destroying Democrat administrations.
“And when you put people that have that sort of bent in charge of our armed forces,” he warns, “bad things are going to happen.”
What conservative-leaning Maginnis calls “bad things” are viewed as left-wing progress at the Pentagon, however. That was demonstrated when the U.S. Navy, concerned about missing its recruiting goals, decided to use a drag queen sailor nicknamed “Harpy Daniels” as a recruiting tool.
tells AFN he is still waiting for the Pentagon to make things right for the thousands of service members who were forced out of uniform because they refused the experimental COVID-19 shot. Now that time has lapsed since the pandemic, and more is known about the vaccine itself, he says, those men and women deserve an apology and compensation.
“They shouldn't be punished,” Maginnis argues, “because the science was not on the government's side as has been demonstrated.”
