Gay rights’ advocates can chalk up another victory. From The New York Times:
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday stopping enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, ending the military’s 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.
U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips’ landmark ruling was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.
“This order from Judge Phillips is another historic and courageous step in the right direction, a step that Congress has been noticeably slow in taking,” said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United and the sole named veteran plaintiff in the case along with the Log Cabin Republicans.
The judge said that
the law unconstitutional after a two-week nonjury trial in federal court in Riverside. She said the Log Cabin Republicans “established at trial that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Act irreparably injures servicemembers by infringing their fundamental rights.”
She said the policy violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guaranteed by the First Amendment.
“Furthermore, there is no adequate remedy at law to prevent the continued violation of servicemembers’ rights or to compensate them for violation of their rights,” Phillips said.
The issue for me is not the impact on the military, which is the way that some supporters of overturning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell frame it. For me, the issue is citizenship: Gays and lesbians are either full partners in the American project — and can serve openly in defense of their country, get married and do all the other things that other Americans can do — or they can’t. And if they can’t, as people like New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino and other Tea Party candidates seem to believe, then the United States is not the nation we pretend it to be.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 