Two U.S.
congressmen have sent letters to Deputy Secretary of State
John Negroponte, calling for the State Department to
act quickly to rehire language-qualified soldiers
dismissed from the armed services because they are
gay.
Democrats Tom
Lantos, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
and Gary Ackerman, chairman of the Subcommittee on the
Middle East and South Asia, referred to the
Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, under
which the linguists were discharged, as "one of
the most regressive, counterproductive policies we
could ever imagine."
"We are writing
to urge the Department of State to take a specific
step," they wrote, "the hiring of our unfairly dismissed,
language-qualified soldiers--so our nation might
salvage something positive from the lamentable results
of this benighted policy."
The congressmen
also note that statistics from the Government
Accountability Office on the military's ban on openly gay
service members show that more than 300 soldiers
with critical foreign language skills, including
fluency in Persian and Arabic, have been dismissed
from the military. Now many of those gay and lesbian
linguists have gone to work for contractors, who sell
their services back to the U.S. government, marking up
the price for taxpayers.
"While we lament
our government's anachronistic and short-sighted
adherence to the bigoted 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, we
see no reason why our nation's diplomatic mission
should suffer for the military's lack of vision. We
hope you will agree." (The Advocate)
