Word: nunne
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week in the cavernous hearing room of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn was again belaboring the proposed regulation on homosexuals in the military. The Senator from Georgia wanted to nail down exactly what sorts of statements by a soldier would trigger a "rebuttable presumption" that he or she was engaged in gay conduct -- a legal finding that, despite its name, experts say is almost impossible to rebut...
With studied dramatics, Nunn posed several possible statements to Defense Department general counsel Jamie Gorelick. "I am a homosexual," he read from his paper. "Yes," answered Gorelick, that would trigger the presumption. "I am a lesbian," Nunn intoned. "Yes." "I am bisexual," said Nunn, who once fired two staff members for being gay, claiming they were security risks. "Yes." Finally, Nunn sprung one Gorelick hadn't expected. "I have a homosexual orientation," he said. Gorelick hesitated. Homosexual "orientation" was exactly what the new regulations tolerated in a military man or woman; admitting to it, however, was not. Yes, she agreed...
Stoddard, like most of Washington's Nunn-watchers, was assuming that the Senator was putting the finishing touches on a work that was his -- and the Joint Chiefs' -- in all but name. The hearings were seen as Nunn's attempt to trim down the thin veneer of political correctness the President had added to the policy in order to claim an "honorable compromise." As irritated as Nunn might be at Clinton's admittedly tortured distinctions between gay "orientation" (to be tolerated) and gay "conduct" (grounds for dismissal), the betting was that he would merely badger Defense Secretary Les Aspin...
...Nunn did, but he did it his way. Last Friday, two days after his hearings, he unveiled his proposal -- as part of the defense appropriations bill, passed almost immediately by his Armed Services Committee and very likely to become law. Devoid of many of Clinton's ambiguous locutions, it continued the substantive war Nunn had waged in the hearings. While sparing the President's distinction between orientation and conduct, it eliminated even the faintest possibility that a soldier could admit gay orientation, in public or private. It dropped a clause promising "equal enforcement" among straights as well as gays...
...chagrin Nunn's revision caused Clinton, who endorsed it later on Friday, it made little difference to the future hopes and strategies of Stoddard and his allies, which are firmly -- if perhaps vainly -- pinned to the court system...