Opinion: What's Next for Gays After the DADT Repeal?

Despite all the hullabaloo over Senate passage of legislation repealing the Clinton-era "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring gays from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces, gay men and lesbians will still have to wait a bit before being able to serve openly, to say nothing of making progress on other legislative fronts.

"After President Obama signs the legislation," reports AP national security writer Robert Burns, "the Pentagon must still certify to Congress that the change won't damage combat readiness." That provision likely secured the support of the two most junior Republicans in the Senate, Massachusetts' Scott Brown and Illinois' Mark Kirk, both men with a record of military service.

But this has many wondering how the armed forces will proceed with implementing the policy.

The Pentagon report that reached the broad conclusion that open service, properly implemented, would not impact unit cohesion also indicated that things might not proceed as smoothly as some would like.

As blogger and Vietnam veteran Bruce Kesler reminds us:

The official Pentagon summary says 70 percent of the military see a positive or neutral effect, but that skews the actual poll result: 20 percent saw no and 19 percent positive impact, 30 percent negative, and 32 percent some of both. The majority of Marine and Army combat troops saw negative impacts.

To accommodate those concerns, Defense Secretary Robert Gates assured Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., that implementation would proceed in stages, "sequenced in order to protect small unit cohesion":

"We have not determined the specific methodology that would be used should this legislation pass, but I can assure you that the specific concerns that you raise will be foremost in my mind as we develop an implementation plan," Gates told Webb in a Dec. 17 letter. "Further, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I remain committed to work closely with the Service Chiefs and the Combatant Commanders in developing this process."

It remains to be seen how exactly the military will determine that "specific methodology." Kesler finds that while the Pentagon "implementation plan" does establish a process for education, the plan remains somewhat incomplete as "the supposedly guiding 'Vignettes' appendix" fails, for example, to provide a "real answer to how to deal with challenges to military order or living conditions."

The Palm Center's Aaron Belkin, however, believes repeal "really isn't rocket science" given that "the troops already know how to interact with gays because they do so every day":

When you read the Pentagon's 87-page implementation plan, you see that the transition requirements can be boiled down to just two things: strong leadership and simple rules.

The Palm Center holds that it can be done in "a matter of weeks," while the defense secretary thinks a year may be needed to educate troops, with the specific methodology yet to be determined.

So, while we know what's ahead for gay troops, we still do not the precise how and the when. The same can't be said for other legislative priorities.

The lengthy path to "don't ask, don't tell" repeal shows that gay groups cannot count on Democrats to push their agenda; they needed to aggressively lobby even elected officials who promised repeal in their campaigns, finally threatening them with a loss of gay financial support in future electoral contests.

Despite large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as well as administration support of repeal, it took Democrats until the final days of the 111th Congress to pass repeal.

And now with Republicans returning to majority status in the House while significantly strengthening their hand in the Senate, gay groups will have even less clout in the 112th Congress, particularly given the failure of gay groups, notably the Human Rights Campaign, the largest in Washington, to reach out to the GOP.

With Democrats about to lose control of the House, Stephen H. Miller, blogging at the Independent Gay Forum, believes the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, for example, a bill long championed by national gay groups, is dead. During "the two years of a Democrat-controlled Congress," he writes, the bill never even "made it out of committee."

That's not likely to change, unless gay groups can implement a strategy to appeal to Republicans.

B. Daniel Blatt founded the Log Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia and blogs at GayPatriot.net.