E-Mail This Article to a Friend GETTING THE BOOT Is the tide turning against ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’? BY DEIRDRE FULTON

Armed with the energy of public opinion, the visibility of a Supreme Court case, and now a legislative strategy that focuses more on national security than on social philosophy, the movement to overthrow the military’s controversial "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" (DADT) law keeps gathering momentum.

Opinion polls show that a majority of junior enlisted servicemembers support allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military, and more than 60 percent of the American public agrees. In December, the Washington, DC–based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network sued the Pentagon to win reinstatement for 12 discharged gay and lesbian servicemembers (see " ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Comes Under Fire," This Just In, December 17, 2004). And last week, flanked by high-ranking military leaders, Massachusetts congressman Marty Meehan introduced his Military Readiness Enhancement Act, which would repeal DADT and replace it with a nondiscrimination policy.

Not since 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the law — which allows gays to serve as long as their sexuality is not out in the open — has the gays-in-the-military debate garnered this much attention. It was in that year that Meehan first offered legislation in opposition to DADT. This time around, he’s bolstering his argument with numbers:

• The US government has wasted more than $200 million recruiting and training new soldiers to replace the 9488 who have been thrown out under DADT, according to a Meehan-commissioned Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

• The GAO also found that more than 300 of those servicemembers were linguists — including 54 who spoke Arabic — and more than 750 were soldiers with "critical skills" or worthy of "selective re-enlistment bonuses."

• These numbers don’t even touch on the administrative costs of investigating and rooting out gay and lesbian servicemembers, nor do they address the question of how much talent is lost when the policy scares people away from signing up in the first place.

• Sixty percent of the countries that make up the coalition in Iraq allow gays to serve openly, including Great Britain, Australia, and Italy.

In other words, implementing DADT in this time "seems to me to be losing competent, qualified, brave soldiers and Marines," Meehan says. "You know, we don’t even have all the Al Qaeda chatter on intelligence tapes translated, because of a lack of linguists."

It’s the military’s version of a brain drain, says Nathaniel Frank, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, at the University of California Santa Barbara. And though Frank isn’t overly optimistic that change will come during this Congress, he’s encouraged by the growing body of evidence showing how "out of whack" the policy is with the nation’s military needs.

This evidence may just convince hawkish conservatives. "I think that it is the right strategy because I think that in the past it hasn’t resonated with the people who have the power to make the change," Frank says.

That’s good news for people like 48-year-old Jeffrey Schmalz, of Dartmouth, a 25-year veteran who left the military last year to marry his partner.

"Every day of military service, I had to lie," Schmalz recalls. "As far as I’m concerned ... that’s a lot more destructive to any kind of morale or cohesion than the fact of what we do in private."