Don’t change “don’t ask, don’t tell” chaplains say: The Church of England Newspaper, May 5, 2010

First published in The Church of England Newspaper.

President Barack Obama’s call for the US military to end its ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces will decimate the ranks of the chaplain corps, 42 retired senior Army, Navy and Air Force chaplains declared last week in an open letter to the president.

“If the government normalizes homosexual relations in the armed forces, many (if not most) chaplains will confront a profoundly difficult moral choice, whether they are to obey God or to obey men,” the April 28 letter said.

Ending the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (DADT) will curtail religious freedom and affect military readiness by marginalizing those with “deeply held” religious beliefs, the letter signed by the retired Protestant chaplains from the Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican traditions—including the Anglican Church in North America.

“Making orthodox Christians — both chaplains and servicemen — into second-class Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, or Marines whose sincerely held religious beliefs are comparable to racism cannot help recruitment or retention,” they argued.

In his January State of the Union Address, President Obama said he would ask Congress to end the ban on gays in the military. In testimony before Congress on Feb 2, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said he personally supported ending DADT.

The Pentagon has begun a study of the effects of repealing the ban, and on April 30 Secretary of Defence Robert Gates wrote to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) saying he “strongly opposed any legislation that seeks to change this policy prior to the completion of this vital assessment process.”

The Pentagon working group reviewing the implications of repealing DADT has until December to submit its report. DADT was enacted by President Clinton in 1993 after Congress passed a law that same year banning homosexuals from serving in the military. Though it bars gays from serving in the military, it also bars the military from asking service members their sexual orientation.

Changing DADT, the retired officers said, would muzzle chaplains, dictating what they could say in sermons and in counselling sessions. If the policy was changed, chaplains who did not support the normalization of homosexuality could be dismissed from the service or “run the risk of career-ending accusations of insubordination and discrimination,” the letter said.

The Rt Rev David Bena, the former suffragan Bishop of Albany and currently a Bishop of the Church of Nigeria’s Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) said that during his service as an Air Force chaplain “no one ever tried to muzzle me, not even when I worked as Public Relations Officer for the Chief of Air Force Chaplains.”

In the US armed forces, the chaplain serves as an “adviser to the commander on spiritual, moral, and ethical issues. Therefore, for a commander to muzzle him is to shut off input from a chief source.”

Bishop Bena told The Church of England Newspaper that he believed that while DADT “skirts the issue of homosexuals in the military, it does allow the services to have integrity in managing the force, and allows order and discipline in the ranks.”

He explained that “sexual fraternization on duty is a punishable offence. That includes heterosexual as well as homosexual relations. Many military members live in close quarters – sharing shower and bathroom facilities, sleeping in close proximity to many others.”

“To add the burden that it is somehow ‘okay’ to have sex with a fellow soldier in quarters adds greatly to the pressure of military life. Doing away with DADT opens the door to a decline in morale and an increase in anarchy,” the bishop said.