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Introduction

Allowing gay personnel in the armed forces continues to be a subject of great debate, having only been instituted in a handful of militaries around the world (that is, the vast majority of industrialized, Western countries, in addition to Brazil, South Africa, Israel, and South Korea).

This keeps pace with the latest global figures on acceptance of homosexuality, which suggest that tolerance of LGBT communities is only becoming more widespread in secular, affluent countries.

However, a progressive policy toward gay and lesbian soldiers does not invariably guarantee that LGBT citizens are immune to discrimination in that particular society. Even in countries where LGBT persons are free to serve in the military, activists lament that there remains room for improvement. Israel, for example, a country that otherwise struggles to implement LGBT-positive social policy, nevertheless has a military well known for its broad tolerance of openly gay soldiers.

History has seen societies that both embrace and shun openly gay service-members in the military. But more recently, the high-profile 2010 hearings on Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the United States propelled the issue to the center of international attention. They also shed light both on the routine discrimination, violence, and hardship faced by LGBT-identified soldiers, as well as arguments in favor of maintaining a ban on their service.

Arguments for not including openly LGBT people

The arguments against allowing openly gay servicemen and women in the military abound. While most research data have all but debunked traditional arguments in favor of policies like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, homosexuality is still perceived by most countries to be incompatible with military service.

A recurrent argument for a ban on homosexuals in the military rests on the assumption that, in the face of potentially homosexual members of their unit, prospective recruits would shy away from military service. Based on an inconclusive study produced by the RAND Corporation in the run-up to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, American military recruits were expected to decrease by as much as 7%. However, this does not appear to have materialized.

In a line of work that regularly demands that personnel be in close living quarters, allowing openly homosexual servicemen is argued to flout a fundamental tenet of military service: ensuring that soldiers remain undistracted from their mission. If gay men are allowed to shower with their fellow male soldiers, so goes the argument, this would, in effect, violate the "unique conditions" of military life by putting sexually compatible partners in close proximity, with potentially adverse effects on retention and morale of troops. Anecdotal evidence advanced during the hearings on Don't Ask, Don't Tell of 1993, with US Senator Sam Nunn and General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. recalled "“instances where heterosexuals have been solicited to commit homosexual acts, and, even more traumatic emotionally, physically coerced to engage in such acts.”

Military historian Mackubin Thomas Owens lamented in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal that gay men and women would be too partial to their lovers in the heat of battle. "Does a superior order his or her beloved into danger," Owens asks, "if he or she demonstrates favoritism, what is the consequence for unit morale and discipline? What happens when jealousy rears its head?" Owens echoes the fear that allowing gay soldiers would be deleterious to unit cohesion on the battlefield, arguing that concern for one's lover in a given unit would override any sense of loyalty to the unit as a whole, particularly in situations of life and death.

Owens further asserts that homosexuality may be incompatible with military service because it undermines the very ethos of a military, that is, one of nonsexual "friendship, comradeship or brotherly love."

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a socially conservative advocacy organization, believes that allowing openly homosexual soldiers threatens the religious liberty of servicemen who disapprove of homosexuality for religious reasons.