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The data are very clear and, as you suggest, polls show that the troops are quite comfortable interacting with gay peers.  The rhetoric of military brass has been disconnected from this reality for more than a decade.  The brass would have you believe that foot soldiers just can't handle serving with gays.  The truth is that the foot soldiers in foxholes are fine, and that it's the brass that has the problem.  That has been changing recently, however, as illustrated by Chairman Mullen's historic remarks in favor of fairness and equality.

That's interesting.  There were a lot of other issues that got implicated in the 1993 fight over gays in the military that had little if anything to do with the specific issue at hand.  We were in the middle of an AIDS panic.  We had a new, untested President with no military experience.  We had a new era of peace with no enemy at hand.    Part of Gayle Rubin's argument in her classic study "Thinking Sex" is that moral panics are moments when all kinds of anxieties get expressed at oblique angles, which means that people are worried about one thing, but they act as if they're worried about something else.  The DADT debate, I think, was a text book illustration of this dynamic

Twenty five foreign militaries allow gays and lesbians to utter the words "I am gay" without gettting fired.  Most are in Europe, but not all.  Israel, South Africa, Australia come to mind.  We are also starting to see movement in some Asian and South American countries.

My sense is that gay troops want to serve in the military for the same reasons that all other troops want to serve, a combination of economic opportunity and patriotism. 

All that said, it is possible to draw some comparisons, perhaps, and say that in the same way that the military was able to deal with other difficult integrations, it will be able to lift its gay ban.  The research suggests that lifting the gay ban will be much easier than racial or gender integration.

Not quite.  Most discharges are "tell" discharges, meaning that the service member steps forward and say "I am gay."  But that doesn't quite mean that the military didn't do anything to find out about it.  In about half of "tell" discharge cases, you're absolutely right that the service member is just looking to get out of the military.  But in the other half, folks make statements because they can't live a lie any longer, or because they're facing harassment in their unit and have no other way to handle it.  "Don't ask, don't tell" is directly responsible for these situations, because if it weren't for the policy, gay troops wouldn't be forced by law to live a lie, and if/when they faced harassment, they could report it.

GAO got heavily politicized under President Bush, and really tried to pull a fast one in that particular study.  Yes it is true that on a five point scale, the Arabic linguists who were fired tended to score below three.  What GAO failed to explain, however, is that DLI only teaches to level 3!  Palm did an analysis of this exact issue and if you e-mail me, I will find the link and send it to you.

Not that I know of.  The Palm Center did a study of U.S. troops interacting with gays and lesbians from foreign militaries. It is posted on the 'publications' section at www.palmcenter.org

I don't think the transition will be difficult.  That, at least, is what the research says.  The troops are already serving with gays and lesbians, and everyone knows this.  That said, there is a new group called OutServe made up exclusively of openly gay and lesbian troops, and they can play a useful role in mediating between the needs of the Pentagon and the needs of LGB troops.

SLDN found a lot of violations of "don't ask," in the first few years of the policy, and if you look at their annual reports from the mid-90's, you will see cases like yours.  I am not aware of anyone who has ever been punished for asking.

Thank you for your service to the nation. I agree. This is all about leadership.  The RAND corporation has said that if leaders at all levels endorse the policy, there will be no problem.  This is why foreign militaries have had such an easy time lifting their bans.

I wonder if Notre Dame knows!

Thank you for your service to the country, and for your thoughtful remarks.  I agree that one of the saddest parts of DADT is the free get-out-of-jail card it gives to anyone who wants out of the military, including straight people who can fake being gay.  Many linguists I know about actually did want to stay in uniform and were booted against their will, but I know you are right in that some people use the policy to get out of service obligations>

Yes, women get erased from many of these conversations, and to the extent that I have been partially responsible for that, I apologize.  There is a lot of racial erasing too. Note how many spokespersons for the repeal movement are people of color.  Not many!

I think you are right that many gay troops are independents, conservatives, republicans.  That would be interesting to study whether outness is correlated with political affiliation.  Perhaps there is already research on that but I haven't seen it.

In my visits to military universities I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in that liberal troops often feel that they have to remain closeted about their political beliefs in ways that echo how gay/lesbian troops sometimes have to remain closeted about their orientations.

Gallup found that 91% of young adults support repeal.  But the majority of middle aged and older people support repeal too.  Even republicans support repeal (though the majority is slim).  You have to slice and dice the public into pretty narrow demographics to find groups who continue to support discrimination.  Senator McCain is clearly on the wrong side of history.

There have been more than a dozen polls in recent years financed by everyone from Gallup to Fox News to University of California, all of which found that between 58 and 81 percent of the public supports repeal.  Traditional values groups paid for a single poll that found that a majority prefers discrimination, but when I looked at their question wording, it was quite funky, and was basically a push poll.  The other polls all ask some variant of "should gays and lesbians be allowed to serve openly in the military."  The traditional values poll used question wording that tried to lead the respondent to a particular answer.  That said, polls are just snapshots, and they don't always find the same things.  That's why you have to triangulate across a range of polls rather than relying on a single poll

The unit cohesion argument is fake.  The argument says that straight troops cant trust gays, so that if people are allowed to utter the words "I am gay," units wont be able to form bonds of trust.  I have published a number of studies on the phoniness of this balony, all posted under publications at palmcenter.ucsb.edu.  Or read Nathaniel Frank's book Unfriendly Fire.

Very good points. 

I respectfully disagree. The research is quite clear that all you need is a single nondiscrimination standard that applies equally to everyone, plus leadership support for the new policy.  Nothing else matters.  Look, we informally suspend our ban every time we go to war (and actually there are official regulations that send gays to combat during wartime and then initiate discharge once the bullets stop flying).  I'm sure that the organization that figured out how to win WWII can figure out a policy transition that every other most other western countries have managed.

Under the current DADT law, getting married or attempting to get married to someone of the same sex is grounds for automatic discharge.  The law pretendts that it is a regulation of conduct/behavior but as Harvard professor Janet Halley has shown, it is a regulation of simply being gay even if you one doesn't do anything wrong.  Pretty much any evidence (holding hands, taking a walk with someone, etc etc) can be interpreted as evidence of having a gay identity (legally defined as a propensity to engage in same-sex sexual conduct), which in turn gets you booted.