The practice of "outing" went big time this week with the publication of a story in a national gay newsmagazine reporting that a senior Pentagon official is gay.
Partisans on both sides of the outing debate are claiming the moral high ground as the inevitable rush of news stories surrounding the revelation begins. The Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, has huffily insisted that private lives should be just that: private. The "outers," meanwhile, claim to be exposing the highest levels of hypocrisy at the highest levels of government.
What is clear from both sides of this debate is that there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around.
The Advocate, the gay newsmagazine, went for the brass ring this week with the splashy cover story on a senior Pentagon official who is gay. The magazine said it was announcing his homosexuality because the Defense Department routinely "outs" gays in uniform in its relentless policy of discharging them from the military.
Though the story garnered little pre-publication attention, it did generate tough questions for Cheney when he made the rounds of talk shows last week. Cheney called the military's ban on gays a policy that he "inherited" and made only half-hearted attempts to defend it. He breezily dismissed as "an old chestnut," the Pentagon's assertion that gays are a security risk, long a cornerstone of the military's anti-gay regulations.
As for the senior Pentagon official, Cheney said that he would "absolutely not" seek his resignation, saying that he believed civilian Pentagon employees should be judged by how they did their jobs, not by their private lives.
It is to Cheney's credit that he is not posturing in staunch support of the military's anti-gay policies, which few intelligent residents of the late 20th Century truly believe are merited. Still, the secretary's response to the outing of the senior official has revealed an awesome institutional hypocrisy. He has said, in effect, that while he believes homosexuality should be no barrier to serving in the most privileged echelons of the Defense Department, he still backs the ban on allowing gays to serve as lowly boatswain's mates and staff sergeants.
To hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gay men in uniform, the contradiction is nothing short of cruel. Keep in mind that when gay soldiers are discovered, they are not politely shown the door with the courteous suggestion that they seek employment elsewhere. They are subjected to harsh interrogations and intense harassment.
