Word: stoddard
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After the hearing, Tom Stoddard, head of the gay-rights lobbying group Campaign for Military Service, was despondent but preparing for the next battle. The policy, he says, is "so screwy I'm content to let the courts take over...
...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...
...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...
...scientific evidence in the world will not do anything to change homophobia." Moreover, gays are worried that precise identification of a "gayness gene" might prompt efforts to tinker with the genetic code of gay adults or to test during pregnancy and abort potentially gay fetuses. Says Thomas Stoddard, director of the Campaign for Military Service: "One can imagine the science of the future manipulating information of this kind to reduce the number of gay people being born...
...consensus that appears to be emerging within the A.C.L.U. is typified by board member and gay activist Tom Stoddard, who says the absolutists are seeking "otherworldly vindication of one constitutional right without recognizing that all rights have value and can be reconciled." To him, both equality and liberty must be weighed and many rights enshrined. "Pure consistency is never possible in an organization that addresses so many rights simultaneously," says Stoddard. To the embattled Old Guard, however, purity and consistency were precisely what the A.C.L.U. was once all about...