Sodomy Ruling Brings Military Challenges
Focus
on the Family, August 5,
2003
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0027218.cfm
By Stuart Shepard, correspondent
SUMMARY: The legal ripples from the Supreme Court’s landmark case
involving sodomy laws in Texas are now spreading into courtrooms across the
country. One major target is the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t
Tell” policy.
Under attack through separate court cases are the military’s “Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and the military’s criminal penalty for sodomy.
Each case cites the recent Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence
v. Texas for support.
Kelly Shackelford, president of the Free Market Foundation in Texas, said
nobody thought the Lawrence case was about the sodomy law.
“It was about homosexual activists trying to get new weapons to use in
their advocating of all kinds of homosexual rights,” Shackelford said.
He doesn’t see how the Lawrence case lends credence to the current
challenges.
“Number one: This is the military and great deference is shown to the
military” to make its own rules, Shackelford said. “And secondly: You
obviously can’t conduct a military very efficiently if the soldiers are
engaging in sexual activity with one another.”
Bob Maginnis, a Fox News military analyst and retired Army lieutenant
colonel, said previous gay challenges to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” have
lost in six of the appellate courts. The citing of the Texas case is just part
of that ongoing attempt to get the issue before the Supreme Court.
“The justification for banning homosexuals was always based on unit
cohesion and not on whether or not someone engaged in an illegal behavior. It
was assumed that people who engaged in an illegal behavior would be dealt with
by the criminal statutes,” Maginnis said.
He should know; he helped write the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Maginnis further points out that the military’s official ban on homosexuals
doesn’t even mention sodomy.
The Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling has also been cited
by two men seeking to be married in Arizona, and a Gay-Straight Alliance club
wanting access to a public school in Texas.
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