“If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.” – Ron Wyden, December 18, 2010
Earlier today, the Senate passed the repeal of the 17-year-old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prevented open homosexuals from serving in the U.S. Military.
The bill reached the Senate following its passage in the House of Representatives earlier in the week and only after a cloture vote overcame the threat of a filibuster led by Senator John McCain and several other Republicans. The final vote was 65-31 in favor of repeal.
As debate began on the bill today, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who advocates of repeal worried might miss the vote due to his upcoming prostate cancer surgery on Monday, explained to his colleagues and the spectators in the Senate, “I don’t care who you love…If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.” McCain, whose opposition to repeal has carved its own place in the annals of political chutzpah, lamented, “I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage. And we could possibly and probably…harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.” Following the vote, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), whose efforts to keep hopes for repeal alive when they had appeared dim just last week, said, “We righted a wrong…Today we’ve done justice.”
The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan provides excellent commentary on what this landmark legislation means to gays and lesbians and analyzes how it was accomplished politically, noting:
Like 2009’s removal of the HIV ban, which was as painstakingly slow but thereby much more entrenched, this process took time. Without the Pentagon study, it wouldn’t have passed. Without Obama keeping Lieberman inside the tent, it wouldn’t have passed. Without the critical relationship between Bob Gates and Obama, it wouldn’t have passed. It worked our last nerve; we faced at one point a true nightmare of nothing … for years. And then we pulled behind this president, making it his victory and the country’s victory, as well as ours.
