As you may have heard by now, a US Appeals Court has decided that the military is within its rights to continue enforcing DADT. According to a three judge panel from the Ninth Circuit, the law warrants sufficient deference to postpone dramatic changes in its enforcement for three reasons:
1. Acts of Congress are presumptively constitutional.
2. The judiciary must be particularly deferential to Congress when Congress is doing military things.
3. Judge Phillips is just one federal judge, and her ruling conflicts with others who have ruled before her. (She didn’t do anything wrong in reaching her conclusions, but it does give her stance a little less authority).
We didn’t report on this instantly because it seemed entirely possible at the time, given the back-and-forth of the courts on this issue, that the situation could have changed again by that evening, but it’s been over 24 hours now so we have to entertain that this could stand for a while. (@maars)
Obama has stuck to his guns about pushing a repeal through Congress and getting things done right – or as he says it, “in an orderly fashion.” The Pentagon is expected to have completed its “review” by December 1st, so while it’s not really clear what the next step of this theoretical repeal process will be, it could hypothetically progress after that point. Really, no one is feeling all that optimistic, because as you may have noticed, the Senate and House are both about to get a lot more Republican, and pushing anything gay through Congress is going to be a lot harder – maybe impossible. (@sify)
There are still a few Republicans who don’t see social issues or “culture wars” as the priority for their party – like Rudy Giuliani, who says he supports gay rights and that he “didn’t see [DADT] as a big issue in this. The social issues were not in this. So maybe that’s an area where Republicans can ease up a little bit . . .” Our best bet at this point might be crossing our fingers and hoping that more people like him come out of the woodwork somewhere. Until then, we’ll await the Pentagon’s pronouncement of its dubious research and hope really hard. (@pamshouseblend)
Here’s hoping…fingers crossed.
Hello lovelies,
I get to teach a few courses in Germany on this shennanigans, so here’s how Obama’s apparently trying to get it through. It’s a doosy. Before this new uber-republican congress comes into play there is still going to be one lame duck session of congress that has all the old members in it. In this time they need to get a bunch of bull handled that they didn’t take care of while they were campaigning, namely the entire federal budget for 2011, which guess what has the brouhaha for repealing DADT written into it in the defense dept. budget. So we get to see just how well this hail mary of Obamas’ gets to work. So fingers crossed the outgoing members of congress grow a pair.
Thank goodness the House already passed it. Get with it, Harry Reid-Get this ish done already.
There is an interesting article on the subject in Feministing’s community blog: . The author argues that it is better for the reform to go through congress, because comprehensive reform (training counseling personnel to deal with the issues of lgbt service people, recognising same sex couples as next of kin, pension entitlements etc).
One thing they have ignored is the problem of homophobia, and making a safe atmosphere for lgbt service people. Feelings?