Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyFebruary 16th, 2010
As we noted on the 7th, the Military Times (of which the Air Force Times is a part), has conducted their annual polling about the attitudes or its readership on the issue of open service by gay men and women. While the readership of this publication is conservative and not representative of military personnel at large, trends between years are interesting, as are demographic breakouts.
Our presentation was initial analysis of raw data and we did not delve deeply into the subgroups in the survey. The Air Force Times has released an article which adds additional texture to the limited picture that this non-representative poll presents.
Service members\’ responses were similar when separated by age or rank. The Military Times survey showed opposition to open service was slightly lower among the junior enlisted paygrades of E-1 through E-4 — whose ranks account for nearly half of the armed forces — as well as among racial minorities.
But the difference in responses by gender were stark — more than twice as many women as men (55 percent to 27 percent) support allowing gays to serve openly.
The survey showed noticeable differences by service as well. Marines were the most likely to oppose open service by gays, according to the Military Times survey, with 64 percent holding that view, compared with 52 percent of soldiers, 48 percent of airmen and 45 percent of sailors.
The Times also spoke with personnel to see what concerns they had. Perhaps the most telling was that those who expressed support for repealing the policy has personal experiences in which they knew a gay soldier who served a function that was essential to their task.
Robinson\’s support for repeal goes back to his days as a lieutenant, when he was part of a 12-member team manning an observation post in Macedonia in 1996. They were out on the edge, self-sustaining, with resupply every three weeks. So they cooked their own meals.
But only one troop, a sergeant, could cook — and he was part of the patrol rotation. “We wanted that guy to be the cooking guy, and I got with my sergeant and I said, ‘What do you say we make old Sgt. X kind of the permanent cook?\'” Robinson said. “So he doesn\’t have to go on patrol, and when we come back, we eat well. And everybody was like, yeah, why didn\’t we think of this three months ago?”
The sergeant\’s cooking skills, however, were not the only thing that made him stand out in the minds of his teammates.
“We thought this guy was homosexual” because of the way he carried himself, Robinson said.
“Everybody kind of thought it, but nobody ever really talked about it. But I asked myself, as a lieutenant, ‘What would I think if he told me he was gay?\’ This was before people were talking about this openly in the military. This was a tank battalion.
“And I thought I\’d probably be uncomfortable with it for a minute, and then I\’d be like, oh, yeah, OK.”
He said it was a nonissue with everyone else in the unit as well because the bottom line was that “he was an effective soldier.”
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