TIMES ONLINE: “You don’t have to be straight in the military,” Barry Goldwater said in 1994. “You just have to be able to shoot straight.”
Sixteen years on, the conservative icon and former presidential candidate can look down from the hereafter on an American cultural scene where the President and his top commanders at last agree that gays should be able to serve openly in the armed forces.
They have been joined this week by General Colin Powell, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who once called homosexuality “a behavioural characteristic” unlike such “benign characteristics” as skin colour.
General Powell’s opposition to repealing the longstanding ban on gays in the military helped to produce the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, the death knell of which President Obama announced in his State of the Union address. With General Powell’s change of heart — which aides said came two years ago, even though he waited until Wednesday to announce it — the US Congress is the only remaining obstacle to ending the ban.
For decades, the status of gays and lesbians in uniform has created an apparently unbridgeable gulf between liberals who note that gays are allowed to die for their country but not to be open about their sexuality, and social conservatives who insist that lifting the ban would lead to sexual harassment cases and undermine the effectiveness of fighting units.
It is a potentially explosive political issue that President Clinton tried and failed to resolve in 1994, and that Mr Obama must still sell to Republicans and some Democrats in the centre. >>> Giles Whittell, Washington | Friday, February 05, 2010
