By Aubrey Sarvis

On March 19, America entered the sixth year of the war in Iraq. Four days later, late on Easter Sunday, the Pentagon announced that the four Americans killed that day brought the death toll to 4,000. Regardless of how one feels about the war, no one could deny the sadness and tears embodied in the numbers: five years of war behind us, 4,000 Americans dead, more than 29,000 Americans wounded, and many times that number of Iraqis killed and wounded. Anyone would acknowledge that mountain of misery is very high.

Dying on the field of battle has nothing to do with being gay or being straight or with any of the possible permutations between one end of the bell-shaped curve and the other. A dead soldier is a dead soldier, deserving of our highest respect, and we honor each one of them. Percentages are irrelevant here. It does not matter how many of those honored dead were lesbian, gay or bisexual. But it does matter—and it matters greatly—that even in death the law of the land refuses to respect, honor and acknowledge the full humanity, including the sexual orientation, of those brave gay men and women who gave their lives for their country. Only the congressional/Pentagon-approved version of who they were—the “poster-boy” or “poster-girl” soldier—can be admitted. Even if the gay or lesbian soldier acknowledged his or her sexuality, if everyone around the soldier knew it, and if the family accepted it, the government of the United States willfully refuses to see it. This, frankly, is insulting to the memory of any man or woman.

This question arises today because one of those 4,000 dead in the war in Iraq is an Army major, Alan Rogers, who served with great courage and honor until he was killed by an improvised explosive device on Jan. 27 in Baghdad. His burial in Arlington on March 14 was covered extensively by the Washington Post. Several of his friends have said publicly that Maj. Rogers was gay, and have accused the Post of colluding with the government in keeping that quiet. That is the subject of Deborah Howell’s ombudsman column published in Sunday’s [March 30] Washington Post, “Public Death, Private Life.” The Washington Blade’s lead story [on March 28] was sharply critical of the Post. Its editor, Kevin Naff, sent Howell an e-mail, which she quotes in her column: “It’s a double standard to report basic facts about straight subjects like marital status, while actively suppressing similar information about gay subjects.” I agree.

I, personally, did not know Maj. Alan Rogers. However, I do know that an estimated 65,000 gay American men and women are included among the ranks of those who put their lives on the line for our country in this time of war. Each of those service members is a beloved son or daughter of this country, deserving better than a law that requires them to lie every day as a condition of serving our country.

On Monday [March 31], the president pledged to ensure an outcome to this war that “will merit the sacrifice” of those 4,000 who died in Iraq. He vowed “to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.” I respectfully submit that one way for that to happen would be to make sure the laws of the state regarding liberty and justice for all are applied equally to all. Justice is supposed to be blind. In the case of gay and lesbian soldiers, justice is not blind at all. Repealing [“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”] would be one way of making sure “that those lives were not lost in vain.”

A former Army officer, and longtime Servicemembers Legal Defense Network supporter, spoke eloquently to the issue in a recent e-mail: “All we wanted was to be able to talk about [Alan Rogers] as a friend and loved one and for our relationship with him to be honored. The Post didn’t just bury the fact of his sexual orientation, it appears to have gone to some lengths to excise that entire portion of his life. It’s as if our relationship with Alan never existed. That’s what’s so disrespectful about what they did. What they denied to Alan in death was exactly what the Army had denied him all his life: a chance, for once, to cease all the obsessive compartmentalization that the military required of all of us, and integrate all aspects of his life into a seamless whole.”

Exactly.

In an ironic twist, the number of men and women the military has lost in Iraq since 2003, according to statistician Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at UCLA, is equal to the number who each year fail to re-enlist because they no longer want to serve under [“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”]. They would rather be respected for who they are, not for who Congress and the Pentagon would like them to pretend to be.

Aubrey Sarvis is executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network

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