Word: steffan
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...midshipmen at Annapolis shone as brightly as Joseph Steffan. He not only ranked among the top 10 in his class at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 but as a battalion commander, had under his command one-sixth of the school's students. Then, just six weeks before graduation, Steffan told a fellow midshipman that he was gay. Although there was no evidence that Steffan had ever engaged in a homosexual act, a disciplinary board determined that his sexual orientation was reason enough for discharge. Academy officials downgraded Steffan's military performance from A to F, and Steffan was forced...
Last week a federal appeals court rearranged that report card: Steffan got an A; the military got an F. After concluding that Steffan's constitutional rights had been violated, a three-judge panel ordered that the 29-year-old former midshipman be granted a diploma and commissioned as a second lieutenant. As for the military's aversion to gays, the panel offered a rebuke so stinging that there is question whether the Pentagon's new policy of "Don't ask, don't tell" will be able to withstand constitutional scrutiny. "America's hallmark has been to judge people by what...
...Steffan enjoyed his sweet vindication, the new policy toward gays, folded into Congress's proposed $261 billion military budget, reached the Oval Office for the President's signature. Caught off guard by the court's verdict, Pentagon spokeswoman Kathleen DeLaski insisted that the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy was still on track because the Steffan decision applied to the old 1982 policy, which in effect warns gays, "Don't even think about it." But White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers vaguely allowed that the ruling does have implications for the new policy...
...advocates, now including prestigious law firms, are determined to prove Myers right. Steffan's case, which the Pentagon can appeal, is just one of 50 wending their way through the court system in hopes of upsetting the Pentagon policy. They variously attack the policy as violating the due-process, equal- protection and free-speech rights of gay soldiers. As a collective challenge, the cases seek to remove gay rights from the political arena and force a judicial review by the Supreme Court. The strategy is evocative of the civil-rights struggle, which in the 1950s turned to the Supreme Court...
...most effective ways of opening the eyes of people to what has happened to gays in the military is to show that it is the same thing that happened to Black Americans and women "Steffan said...