Why don’t they just send him a form letter?
Delivering the keynote address for the Pentagon’s Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, and Transgender Pride Month headline event on Tuesday, Department of Defense general counsel Jeh Johnson described how surprisingly smoothly the U.S. military has accepted openly gay members.
Johnson noted that it was the first time in American military history that a gay pride event took place in the Pentagon, where the auditorium held a standing-room-only crowd.
His talk discussed details of how the government last September ended the “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” policy that had been in place since President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Johnson, along with Army General Carter Ham, co-chaired the Pentagon working group in 2010 that drafted the critical report leading to repeal of DA/DT. Their work included extensive polling and face-to-face interviews with thousands of soldiers.
Their report concluded that the risk repeal of DA/DT posed to overall military effectiveness would be low.
But he said the actual impact has been even lower than they thought. One participant called it more of a “speed bump” than an impact.
Johnson told the assembled crowd, “Three years ago it would have been hard for any of us to believe that in 2012, a gay man or woman in the armed forces could be honest about their sexual orientation, that the Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell law would be gone, and that the process of repeal would go even more smoothly than we predicted it would in our report.”