Misogyny is acceptable, Homosexuality is Not

Since 1994, at least 12,000 US servicemen, and more specifically 60 Arabic translators working for the military, have been dismissed from the as a result of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
The case of study of West Point grad Dan Choi, five-year Army veteran who received his discharge letter reading “you admitted publicly that you are a homosexual which constitutes homosexual conduct,” has drawn a lot of attention from the mainstream press in the past week, but another telling tale from a few years back is Stephen Davis, former petty officer second class in the navy.
Like Choi, Davis was an Arabic translator; President Bush invested $100,000 in what he called the Strategic Language Initiative specifically to address the national security issue of the shortage of translators.
In October of 2006, inspectors at Fort Gordon where Davis was based, identified 70 service members whose use of the government computer chat system violated policy, Davis among them. The violations included a number of what could be considered “gender issues,” including specifically derogatory comments about women, outright discussions of explicit (heterosexual) sexual activity, and in the case of Davis and one another, mere references to their identification as gay.
The 68 heterosexual servicemen remained on active duty. Davis and the other did not.
Now, let’s examine the primary rationalization for “don’t ask, don’t tell:” that some straight people might be uncomfortable serving alongside gay people. It could, in theory, be possible that the net overall productivity of the Armed Forces is increased, therefore, by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (which, clearly, would not inherently make the policy justified).
That having been said, women make up a full 20% of the US Military, and it is completely logical that a women would feel uncomfortable in an environment where misogy and sexual harrassment is tolerate, whereas I think most of us would agree that people of different sexual orientations ought to be able to coexist.

So that specifically, that the army dismissed people on the basis of sexual orientation, on the basis that a heterosexual personnel have such antipathy for gay people that they would be unable and unwilling to serve with them, but did not discipline those whose comments were sexual harrasment, which most definitely alienates women personnel, seems like an absurd standard of measure.
In a survey published by the Pentagon in March of 2008, one third of women in the military reported having been sexually harrassed and more than 2,500 women in the miltiary had reported sexual assault in the previous year.
Furthermore, according to the “Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense’s Report on the Service Academy Sexual Assault and Leadership Survey,” published in 2005, the majority of female victims of sexual assault did not report because they feared doing so would have negative ramifications on their careers in the military.
Going further, in July of 2005, The Defense Department explained a core reason for misogynism intrisic to the military: “The task force … found that because female service members are a minority, are excldued from some of the highly regarded combat specialities and are held to different physical fitness standards, some in the Academy communities do not value women as highly as men.”
The comfort of homophobic straight men is held in higher regard than the literal safety and psychological well-being of female servicemen.
The US Military, by barring women from many combat positions, and by barring openly homophobic Americans from serving their country at all, isn’t solving any problems.
Perhaps the best way of building a military that is cohesive, and making sure we meet recruitment goals, isn’t to restrict people whose identity might create conflict, but rather, to encourage a community where different sorts of identities are respected.