A Silly Practice

Recent newspaper reports indicate that our nation’s military services will fall far short of their recruiting goals for this year. According to the reports, the Army has recruited 7,000 fewer enlistees than the 74,500 it needs to maintain its current force.

Under these circumstances, the military’s practice of involuntary discharges of gay service members is absurd. In 1998, our combined military forces discharged 1,145 service members simply because of their sexual orientation. Not discharging these people would do much to reduce the serious staffing problems facing our military services.

These discharged service members were trained at great expense to the American public. Many of the services are dropping their education requirements in order to attract more enlistees. This means we will be replacing highly qualified professional services members, who happen to be gay, with less qualified, less professional personnel.

I think this country is being shortchanged by the policy of prohibiting gays in its military services.