PLEASE NOTE: This thread is not really about any particular law, so please don’t give your opinions about whether or not you are in favor of any particular law. I’m only using this one as an example.
Yesterday, the United States repealed its “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, under which gays had to keep that secret, or they’d be expelled from the armed forced. Now, they can be open, with no fear of expulsion.
Now, here’s my question: Why does it take so long?
I can understand that if a sales tax is changed, it takes a while to get the new calculations to all the merchants, and it takes a while to reprogram all those cash registers. But why would it take any time at all to simply not expel someone for letting it be known that they are gay?
Again, PLEASE NO OPINIONS ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THIS LAW. What I want to know is: Once the law has passed, how complicated is it to effect those changes?
In this case, it’s specifically because that’s the way the law was written. It was decided to make this a gradual and deliberate process. They could have just as easily written the repeal to occur instantaneously, but they might not have had the votes for that.
The situation with DADT is atypical. The law that was repealed had nothing to do with banning homosexuality itself, which was the rule before DADT and is still the rule. It prohibited disclosing or acting on one’s homosexuality, and prohibited investigating members of the military for homosexuality without prior evidence (more or less). The ban itself can only be ended by the President and the rest of the military leadership, and Obama has promised not to do this precipitously. Ending the ban via his authority as Commander in Chief is what Clinton planned to do, which is why Congress passed DADT in the first place – to make ending the ban pointless (and it was a compromise at that; they originally moved to codify the ban itself into law, without even the limited protection of the “Don’t Ask” part of DADT).
How is it a good idea to make this gradual (or even delayed)? If any gay soldiers get themselves outed in the meantime, isn’t that going to get even more ugly and complicated than it would either if DADT were still unambiguously in place, or definitively overturned? Now, if someone get dishonorably discharged (or whatever) for being openly gay one day, or one hour, before DADT is officially dead, the shit is really going to fly.
It is not like they have to work out a whole bunch of administrative details about how to not punish people.
If that is right, it appears that until Obama gets the guts to ‘precipitously’ order the end of the ban, gays in the military are now in a considerably more vulnerable position than they were before the repeal. Now they can be actively investigated and “asked.”
That’s not correct. The DADT repeal specifically says that DADT is still in place until the new policies are in place.
DoD’s feeling in this case is that they need to work out new policies so as to make troops comfortable to serve with openly gay people, and to have procedures in place to deal with any tension or problems that might cause.
Right. And the law that was just passed gives specific guidance on what policies need to be studied and implemented before DADT is fully done away with:
Aside from things like developing a training curriculum to teach people what is and is not allowed when dealing with openly gay troops, and actually conducting the training, there also has to be new policies developed on allocation of benefits, and a new government strategy on the court cases brought on by those who were previously discharged under DADT.
What Ravenman said. "developing a training curriculum to teach people what is and is not allowed when dealing with openly gay troops, and actually conducting the training, there also has to be new policies developed on allocation of benefits, and a new government strategy on the court cases brought on by those who were previously discharged under DADT. "
That’s certainly a matter of opinion. But the fact is that the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff specifically recommended these studies.
In terms of sexual harassment policies, I would be inclined to say that the existing guidance is inadequate because it never contemplated this situation. We are dealing with an institution that thrives on spelling every damned detail out on paper, from how to align your belt to thousands of pages of requirements documents on how a Humvee must perform.
The armed forces do not generally encourage individuals to come up with ad hoc personnel policies. Every damned detail will be written out in an attempt to insure that the policy will be fair and uniformally implemented.
Just curious. Let’s say that Rev. Pat Robertson (for example) gets elected President in 2012. Can he simply reinstate the pre-1993 ban on gays in the military? If so, what about all of the ones that “come out” between 2010 and that time? Could they be immediately dismissed from service? It seems that they could.
Strange how this law, when passed, was considered a huge step up for gay rights, but now it is an albatross that needs shedding.
The “DADT Repeal Act” is mis-named. What it does (once the certifications have been made and the sixty-day period has passed) is strike out 10 U.S.C. 654, which is the law that forbids gays from serving in the military. Once the amendment goes into force, as I understand it, there would be no legal basis to dismiss gay servicemembers, short of a new Act of Congress.
But what if the new President Falwell, Jr. decided that gays were bad for morale and he was using his power as commander in chief to expel all of them? What law would stop him?
And the law prescribes no limit on how long it might take to complete them. If it happens to take ten or twenty years, there’s nothing in the law to rush them. This has happened in other cases: In one example that I’m aware of, a law passed in 1995 required a certain action to be taken by 1999, but gave the President the authority to suspend that requirement for a period of six months. And like clockwork, the President has indeed suspended it every six months ever since, rendering that law almost worthless. It is my observation that the military could similarly render the repeal of DADT worthless, simply by delaying the writing of new policies. (If this were GD, I’d mention my opinion about laws which contain such loopholes.)
I’ve certainly seen my share of legalese, but this seemed like overkill to me. But I’ve never been in the military, so I’ll take your word for it. Thanks for being so clear.
This may be an exaggeration, but implementation dates of laws are often set for political reasons.
The US Social Security Act required a massive record-keeping (and tax-collecting) system to be set up (in an age without computers), but the first payout under the system was about 1-1/3 year after the President signed the bill into law.
The recent Health Care act was passed in the current highly-computerized in 2009, but many of its parts don’t go into effect until 2014, 5 years later. Politicasl opponents have stated that they demanded this long delay to give them a chance to repeal it before it ever goes into effect.
So an implementation date can be set for many reasons, often political ones related to gaining votes for it.