Word: dadt
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...Aside from commending the soon-to-be lieutenants and ensigns, President Faust will use her pulpit at the ROTC ceremony to decry the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy, which precludes homosexuals from openly serving in the military...
...Faust will attend the ROTC commissioning, but with an asterisk. Proof to the aged adage—beware geeks bearing gifts—Faust will harness the symbolism of her appearance by criticizing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” (DADT) the federal law that bars openly gay Americans from serving in the military. While she will recognize the value of military service, Faust will also express her wish that, “every Harvard student had the opportunity to serve in the military...
...President Faust should absolutely use the occasion to express this community’s moral outrage at DADT. It would be offensive to our values for Harvard’s ROTC graduates not to begin their service in the shadow of the Pentagon’s repugnant discrimination. (These values are, incidentally, not just President Faust’s—there is no shortage of Harvard ROTC students who oppose DADT, but who are forced to keep their silence because of the military’s restrictions on their free speech...
...hardly extreme to claim that all Americans who value liberty and equality—not just those in uniform—should be deeply embarrassed by the profound systemic discrimination that DADT embodies. What kind of liberal democracy, after all, can passively abide what Faust rightly described last week as “a badge of degradation or second-class citizenship” for gay Americans...
...point, however, is not to hold cadets and midshipmen responsible for their political overlords’ intolerance. The decision to ban gays from the military was not theirs to make. But if this country is to overcome the well-worn prejudices that make DADT possible politically, then moral objections to the status quo must be involved wherever the military and civil society meet—in Harvard Yard, for example. And the generation of military officers now being educated at Harvard and elsewhere should rightly have their service tinted by the discrimination of DADT, at their commissioning and elsewhere...