Word: steffan
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Judge Zilly's ruling heartened gay-rights activists. "Change in this policy is inevitable," said Joseph Steffan, whose 1987 expulsion from the U.S. Naval Academy on similar grounds was overturned by an appeals court late last year. "The only question is when, and decisions like this lead to the conclusion that it may be sooner rather than later." The military itself seems torn about whether to appeal the Cammermeyer verdict. "We have to press ahead," said one official. "If we let this decision stand . . . we'd be barred from enforcing our own policy." Yet Pentagon spokesman Dennis Boxx was more...
...ruling that said the Pentagon's old policy toward gays was unconstitutional. The appeal, which avoids the constitutional aspects of excluding gays from the military, is based on the narrowest technical grounds: whether it is within the purview of the court to order the Pentagon to commission Midshipman Joseph Steffan, an admitted homosexual. The White House says it must challenge the ruling in order to ultimately defend its new and slightly more liberal "Don't ask, don't tell" policy when, as expected, it meets with legal challenges...
More and more, the courts are being prodded to legitimize a sea change in societal norms that legislators have refused to recognize. One day after the Steffan decision, a New York court ordered the state university's law school in Buffalo to halt campus interviews by military recruiters, because, said Judge Diane Lebedeff, "there is no dispute the military currently engages in sexual-orientation discrimination in its employment practices." With two such clear strikes against the Pentagon's practices, it is only a matter of time before the Supreme Court takes up the issue...
...federal appeals court ruled that the armed forces cannot expel anyone on account of his or her sexual orientation. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Joseph Steffan was wrongfully dismissed from the Naval Academy in 1987 and ordered him to be graduated immediately and given a commission. The effect that the decision will have on the military is unclear. The lawsuit was a challenge to the old policy on gays, but the reasoning appears also to apply to the new "Don't ask, don't tell" policy...
JOSEPH C. STEFFAN...