Would Openly Gay Servicemembers Hurt Straight Military Families?

That's the discernible message in the Pentagon's second attempt to assess the effect of a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. Mailed to about 150,000 military spouses, this version suffers from the same problems as a similar survey issued last month to 400,000 active and reserve troops: loaded questioning, insensitivity, and (as I reported a month ago) methodological problems that make its findings useless.

In the military spouse survey's 13-pages, the questions imply that military families would not want to share social activities or housing with LGBT families. It seems the Pentagon believes the presence of openly gay soldiers and their tainted-by-affiliation family would not only discourage servicemembers from enlisting (q. 16), but also that military families would avoid deployment-support activities (q. 29) or that military families would move off-base if openly-gay military families lived in their same neighborhood (q. 24).

Servicemembers United, the organization advocating on behalf of LGBT members of the U.S. armed services, posted a leaked version of the survey. Here are the five most offensive questions:

• How important a factor would a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" be to you in making decisions about your spouse's future in the military?
• Assume "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed and you live in on-base housing. If a gay or lesbian service member lived in your neighborhood with their partner, would you stay on-base or would you try to move out?
• Assume "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed. Would the attendance of a gay or lesbian Service member with his or her partner affect how often you attend these types of military social events?
• Assume "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed and your spouse is deployed. Would the presence of a partner of a gay or lesbian Service member affect how often you attend deployment-support activities?
• Assume "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed. Would repeal affect your family readiness?

What if, for example, the Pentagon questioned whether the presence of black servicemembers in on-base housing would cause white military families to move out of the neighborhood? The military community would never accept such an offensive survey.

In an official statement, the Executive Director of Servicemembers United, Alexander Nicholson, agrees. "This survey of military spouses contains many of the same insulting and derogatory assumptions and insinuations about gays and lesbians that ran throughout the last survey," Nicholson, a former U.S. Army Human Intelligence Collector, said. "Again we stress that [no one] would ever stand for such insulting questions being asked about any other minority group in the military in this day and age."

Check out a copy of the survey below.

Pentagon's DADT Spouse Survey

Photo credit: The National Guard