Originally distributed September 29, 2000, by Scripps Howard News Service.
WHEN NOT SERVING Arizona as a Republican state representative, Steve May serves his country. As an Army Reserve First Lieutenant, 28-year-old May has led 200 soldiers in fuel-transport and logistical tasks. He has trained troops to protect themselves from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. He even won the Silver Dolphin Award after spending 63 days underwater on the USS Ohio, a Trident missile submarine.
"Lt. May is an intelligent and effective officer," his August 1999 performance evaluation declares. "Put in company command as soon as possible."
So what has the Army done for him lately? A three-colonel panel dismissed May with an honorable discharge on Sept. 17. His offense? He publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, thus negating his record of exemplary conduct.
May is among the 6,000-plus combatants sacked since 1993 for failing to live in a military-strength state of denial called Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The Defense Department, meanwhile, still winks at heterosexuals whose improprieties undermine national security.
Steve May was accused not of conduct but of comments unbecoming a soldier. Army officials objected to his statements during a February 1999 legislative debate on a domestic partnership measure. May objected to, among other things, Republican State Rep. Karen Johnson's remark that gays operate "at the lower end of the behavioral spectrum."
"This legislature takes my gay tax dollars," May replied, "and my gay tax dollars spend the same as your straight tax dollars. If you're not going to treat me fairly, stop taking my tax dollars."
May spoke as a civilian, between completion of active duty in 1995 and reactivation in April 1999 during the Balkan War. Despite articles about his sexuality published during his first campaign in 1996, the Army invoked May's House floor speech and subsequent interviews to pry him from his uniform.
The Army never called May disruptive. "Under the Don't Ask, Don't Tell law, Army officials don't have to prove that I caused a problem with morale or cohesion," May says by phone. "They just have to prove that I said I'm gay."
Indeed, Capt. Stephen Sherbondy, May's then-commander, explained in August 1999 that "the vast majority of personnel" in May's unit knew of his homosexuality, but "such knowledge has in no way affected morale in his platoon or the other platoons. In fact, the HQ section is functioning better than it has for my past tenure as commander."
Ironically, May says, "I have seen a dozen serious problems of a sexual nature between heterosexual soldiers." In 1995, at Ft. Irwin, Calif., May recalls confronting a male and a female who booted three colleagues from an armored personnel carrier, then had sex in the locked vehicle while their fellow soldiers waited outside. The offending GIs received reprimands and counseling, but eventually were promoted.
May also says that "animosity developed down to the enlisted-man level" when a male soldier in his unit began sleeping with the wife of a GI in another company. Tensions erupted when one company's officers and troops accused their counterparts in the other unit of not restraining the two adulterers.
"All I did was say that I'm gay, and they kicked me out," May complains, "whereas these people who committed violations involving heterosexual conduct were forgiven and promoted."
May has plenty of company. Don't Ask, Don't Tell has accelerated dismissals of gay service men and women. In 1989, President Bush's first year in office, 997 GIs were discharged for homosexuality. In 1993, when Bill Clinton and Albert Gore assumed power, 682 were ejected. By 1998, gay expulsions climbed 71 percent to 1,163 before slipping to 1,046 last year. Through 1999, the Clinton-Gore administration had ousted 6,157 gay men and women in uniform, according to the Washington-based Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.
"Sexual orientation has nothing to do with duty performance," retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman told me. "What is being done now is not just and fair."
Washington should stop policing the private sex lives of those who protect America's freedoms. Jettisoning gay troops who act professionally is as bigoted as banning all openly heterosexual GIs because a relative few have become pregnant at sea or sexually harassed others at Tailhook and Aberdeen. Instead, the Pentagon should impose a simple, universal standard. If soldiers can capture enemy territory, they stay. If they conquer their fellow GIs, they go.
While he was defense secretary, Republican vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney accurately called the ban on avowedly gay soldiers "an old chestnut." It's past time to roast this policy on an open fire.