Sep 23, 2005  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

Members of the Army Reserves and the National Guard who inform their commanders that they are gay are routinely converted into active duty status and sent to the Iraq war and other high priority military assignments, according to a spokesperson for an Army command charged with deploying troops.

The spokesperson, Kim Waldron, a civilian who works for the U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Ga., said the active duty deployment of Reservists and National Guard troops who say they are gay, or who are accused of being gay, takes place under a Forces Command or “FORSCOM” regulation issued in 1999.

Waldron said the regulation is aimed at preventing Reservists and National Guard members from using their sexual orientation — or from pretending to be gay — to escape combat.

“The bottom line is some people are using sexual orientation to avoid deployment,” Waldron said. “So in this case, with the Reserve and Guard forces, if a soldier ‘tells,’ they still have to go to war and the homosexual issue is postponed until they return to the U.S. and the unit is demobilized.”

Waldron was referring to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays, which Congress enacted into law in 1993. The policy states that gays may serve in the military as long as they do not disclose their sexual orientation.

Disclosure by a service member that he or she is gay, the policy states, constitutes evidence that the service member is likely to engage in “homosexual conduct,” which is prohibited under the anti-sodomy clause of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Waldron said the FORSCOM regulation doesn’t conflict with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy because Department of Defense regulations that implemented “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” provide for a similar procedure for retaining service members who attempt to circumvent deployment by claiming they are gay.

Acknowledgement follows years of Pentagon denials

The existence of the 1999 FORSCOM regulation was revealed earlier this month by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, a think tank affiliated with the University of California at Santa Barbara. In a news release issued on Sept. 13, the group said its researchers discovered the document while assisting the ABC television program “Nightline” with research on gays in the military.

Aaron Belkin, executive director of the CSSMM, said he was “astonished” that a military spokesperson has confirmed that military commanders routinely deploy service members thought to be gay into active duty assignments.

“The Pentagon has consistently denied that, when mobilization requires bolstering troop strength, it sends gays to fight despite the existence of a gay ban,” Belkin said.

The CSSMM and gay rights groups have asserted for years that gay service members whose sexual orientation becomes known are often retained during wartime, only to be discharged after they return home.

Statistics released by the DOD show that the number of gay discharges rose steadily between 1993, when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was adopted, and 2001, when the U.S. deployed troops to Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The number of gay discharges peaked in 2001 at 1,227, according to DOD figures. By 2004, as U.S. soldiers continued to fight the war in Iraq, the number of gay discharges dropped to 653.

Lt. Col. Ellen Kranke, a DOD spokesperson at the Pentagon, said the DOD has no comment on the FORSCOM regulation other than that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy remains in effect.

“Our policy has not changed,” she said.

Belkin and others familiar with the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy have said they learned through anecdotal reports that some commanders routinely allow known gays to remain in the service while other commanders have taken steps to quickly discharge service members who acknowledge being gay or who are discovered to be gay.

Belkin said the discovery of the FORSCOM regulation represents the first written documentation stating that military commanders actually deploy soldiers suspected of being gay or who admit to being gay to active duty assignments.

“Scholars, lawyers and, most importantly, gay service members themselves, have long known of the military’s practice of looking the other way when it’s time to fight a war,” Belkin said. “Now we have documentation showing this has been a deliberate policy.”

The handbook document in question, FORESCOM Regulation 500-3-3, is called “FORSCOM Mobilization & Deployment Planning System: Volume III Reserve Component Unit Commander’s Handbook.”

The handbook states that if a discharge of a Reservist or National Guard member for homosexual conduct "is not requested prior to the unit's receipt of alert notification, discharge is not authorized. Member will ...