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Subject of Study in Harvard Journal
The study, titled "A Modest Proposal: Privacy as a Flawed Rationale for the Exclusion of Gays and Lesbians from the U.S. Military," was written by Aaron Belkin and Melissa S. Embser-Herbert. Belkin is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at UC Santa Barbara. Embser-Herbert is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. An abstract detailing the authors' focus says: "The justification for excluding acknowledged homosexuals from the U.S. military is the unit cohesion rationale, the notion that lifting the gay ban would undermine combat performance. As a growing body of evidence has challenged the plausibility of this argument, the ban's supporters increasingly have justified exclusion by the preservation of heterosexual privacy in the barracks and showers. "We argue that lifting the gay ban will not undermine heterosexual privacy. Heterosexual service members already shower with known homosexuals, and lifting the ban is unlikely to increase the number of open gays significantly. Few heterosexual service members are extremely uncomfortable around homosexuals, and discomfort that does exist will diminish after lifting the ban. "Finally in addition, same-sex desire and same-sex sexual encounters would occur even if all homosexuals were eliminated from the military. We conclude that the ban itself enables systematic invasions of heterosexual privacy. Hence, experts who seek to protect heterosexual privacy should advocate its removal." The President of the Gay-Lesbian Service Members for Equality (GLSME), a group of about 15 currently-serving gays and lesbians, told the UC Santa Barbara researchers: "When service members join the military, we make a personal decision to deny ourselves the privacy that say, a college student might reasonably expect. All members of the GLSME are known by at least some of their heterosexual peers to be gay or lesbian. We have developed enough of a bond to trust each other with our lives. And given these bonds, changing, showering, and sharing personal space is simply not a problem." |
Santa Barbara, California-- The current issue of International Security, a prestigious military journal edited and compiled by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, has published an analysis of the privacy rationale, the argument that lifting the gay ban would undermine heterosexual privacy in military barracks and showers. The journal, dated Fall, 2002, was not released until January.