Nunn Likely to Narrow Debate on Military Gays

Even as the Clinton Administration struggles to defuse the explosive gays-in-the-military issue, the debate over lifting the armed forces’ ban on homosexuals will be thrown today into the most combustible forum in Washington: Capitol Hill.

Under the gavel of Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the redoubtable chairman of the Armed Services Committee and an avowed opponent of President Clinton’s plan, the tone is supposed to be “thorough and objective,” as the conservative lawmaker promised this weekend.

Over the next several weeks, the proposal to allow openly gay men and lesbians into the military is to be dissected and scrutinized, contextualized and shaped, probed for legal correctness and checked for budgetary implications.

The torrent of angry recriminations is not supposed to come until later in the proceedings, after Nunn has conducted a methodical inquest of the subject with experts and is ready to call in the parties to the dispute. But already, those on all sides of the debate have begun to jostle for political position and testily exchange barbs.

Los Angeles gay and lesbian rights activist David Mixner, in a speech this weekend, dubbed Nunn “an old-fashioned bigot who will abuse his power to deny us our freedom.” A longtime friend of Clinton’s who hopes to persuade the President to recast the issue as a civil rights matter, Mixner portrayed Nunn as “our George Wallace,” referring to the avowed segregationist who ran for president in 1972.

Nunn has held his verbal fire, saying: “When people call me all sorts of names, you know, nobody enjoys that, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” But many gay activists believe that the influential chairman of the Senate defense panel is planning his assault on their cause as skillfully and subtly as a guerrilla general.

Clinton has promised to wait until July 15 before proposing a formal initiative clarifying the status of homosexuals in the military. But until then, it is certainly Nunn--not Clinton and not the gay community--who will set the terms of the debate over whether gays should be permitted to serve openly in the armed forces.

Nunn has cast the issue in the strictly military terms over which he is a grand master--and Clinton and most gay activists are neophytes. At the base of it all, Nunn has said, the hearings will focus on the impact of the proposal on the U.S. military’s esprit de corps and its effectiveness as a fighting force.

“Unit cohesion is the bottom line here,” Nunn said recently, invoking the military argot for the camaraderie that makes soldiers fight and die for each other.

That, said proponents of lifting the ban, is the most sure-fire way to ensure victory for the proposal’s adversaries.

Not only does it bypass the fact that gay men and lesbians are currently serving in the military, but it also ignores the civil rights aspect of the debate that gay and lesbian activists are most inclined to highlight: the question of whether military service members will be judged on who they are or how they perform in the service of their nation.

And, said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), an expert on military personnel issues who favors lifting the ban, Nunn’s focus on unit cohesion makes the military’s prejudices--not the nation’s values or its defense needs--the center of the debate. And there can be no doubt--with 74% of enlisted men and women opposed to the lifting of the ban, according to a recent Times Poll--that the military’s preferences are strong.

“If you asked these guys several years back whether they wanted blacks or women in their ranks, they’d have said, ‘No, that would erode our unit cohesion.’ I think that’s what Nunn’s doing here,” Schroeder said.

Schroeder and others add that Nunn appears to treat unit cohesion as a factor that cannot be influenced by education and leadership of the troops. If the introduction of gays were to threaten unit cohesion, they ask, are unit commanders helpless to restore a unit’s esprit de corps by teaching tolerance and demanding discipline?

The point is expected to be made this week by the Brookings Institution’s Lawrence J. Korb, the only witness proposed by gay activist groups who has been invited by Nunn to testify in the first phase of hearings.

In 1943, Korb told The Times, 84% of white soldiers opposed the racial integration of the armed forces. President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order in 1948 calling for a progressive breakdown of segregation barriers. By 1951, the opposition had fallen to 44%.

In Canada, 80% of military service members said that they disapproved of allowing gays to serve, but the integration of gay soldiers has proceeded virtually without incident. Sometimes, Korb said, the adoption of the policy itself can change attitudes.

“That whole unit-cohesion line is based on the fact that (opponents of lifting the ban) think homophobia is stronger in the U.S. military than is military leadership,” said David M. Smith, spokesman for the Campaign for Military Service, a coalition of gay activist groups lobbying for a lifting of the ban.

“Nunn and the military’s leaders feel that homophobia is so entrenched, it cannot be uprooted by basic leadership. And we’re saying racism also was entrenched in the U.S. military at one time, but it is currently being rooted out of the U.S. military with no problem,” because the military’s leadership has made a commitment to fostering racial tolerance.

Nunn has not proposed to hear testimony from historians or sociologists who have chronicled other initiatives that met with initial resistance from the military. In this week’s hearings, he plans to call on analysts and attorneys who are experts on the history of the military’s exclusionary policy toward gays, and on sociologists and psychiatrists who have studied the phenomenon of unit cohesion.

In Phase 2 of the hearings, which are expected to last until July, witnesses will testify on the experiences of other countries that are dealing with the issue.

And in a third phase, Nunn has said that he will lead visits to military installations, where he will listen to servicemen and women, their families and to military recruiters--again, he noted, “looking at unit cohesion.”

Those military site visits are expected to provide Nunn with some of his most dramatic testimony against the lifting of the ban on gays.

A recent Times survey of 2,346 military enlistees found not only that 74% oppose the ban but also that 81% of those polled predicted gay GIs would be subjected to physical violence from fellow service members. The poll also showed that among those who said they would consider re-enlistment in the service, one in 10 said that they would leave the service specifically if the ban on gays was lifted.

But critics charge that the extent and ferocity of the troops’ opposition has been greatly magnified by the vocal opposition of the armed forces’ most senior leaders. The public remarks of leaders such as Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have virtually delivered Nunn the GI testimonials he will need to support his case, these analysts contended.

While gays who have been thrown out of the military will testify along with advocacy groups, one group of witnesses that almost certainly will not appear before Nunn’s committee will be the gay men and lesbians who now serve in the armed forces.

Under an agreement that Nunn struck with the Clinton Administration, service members whose sexual orientation is discovered or who declare their homosexuality between now and July 15 cannot be summarily discharged. But they remain subject to a range of punishments, including transfer to standby reserve status, a non-paying job that almost certainly would lead to discharge in a shrinking military.

As a result, few of what gay activists believe to be thousands of homosexuals serving in the military have been willing to reveal themselves. They neither will be able to champion their own causes nor show viewers of the hearings the faces of gay men and women serving in uniform.

“I’d be glad to go in there in uniform and show them, ‘This is your typical gay military person. I’m not carrying a purse or wearing false eyelashes or a skirt,’ ” said Bill, an Army intelligence specialist with more than 10 years in the service.

“There’s nothing in my record to give them cause to dishonorably discharge me. Instead, I have assignments, medals, citations and letters of appreciation or citation to attest to my good service,” added the Army enlistee, who said that he would consider appearing before Nunn’s committee only if he were subpoenaed and granted protection from discharge.

“I need to show people the stereotypes do not hold true and tell them they’re going to lose a lot of quality people if they maintain this policy,” he said.

SLAIN GAY SAILOR MOURNED: Hundreds of people protested the military ban on gays and remembered a slain sailor. A3