Case against gays in the military

Supreme Court kicks off its new term this week, with a major dispute on tap over whether a landmark decades-old federal anti-discrimination law that bars sex discrimination in the workplace protects gay and transgender employees. The nine-month term opens on Monday with three cases to be argued before the nine justices. At issue is whether gay and transgender people are covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of , which bars employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex as well as race, color, national origin and religion. The court, whose conservative majority includes two Trump appointees, will hear two cases about gay people who have said they were fired due to their sexual orientation. One involves a former county child welfare services coordinator from Georgia named Gerald Bostock.

The United States military formerly excluded gay men , bisexuals , and lesbians from service. In , the United States Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a law instituting the policy commonly referred to as " Don't ask, don't tell " DADT which allowed gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to serve as long as they did not reveal their sexual orientation. Although there were isolated instances in which service personnel met with limited success through lawsuits, efforts to end the ban on openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people serving either legislatively or through the courts initially proved unsuccessful. In , two federal courts ruled the ban on openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual service personnel unconstitutional, and on July 6, , a federal appeals court suspended the DADT policy. In December , the House and Senate passed and President Barack Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of , and under its provisions, restrictions on service by gay, lesbian, and bisexual personnel ended as of September 20,

As expected, President Obama pledged during his State of the Union address to "work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. The law codified regulations in effect before President Bill Clinton's inauguration, making the historical prohibition against military service for homosexuals a matter of statute. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed in June of last year, "What we have is a law, not a policy or regulation. And as I discovered when I got into it, it is a very prescriptive law.

Policing the legality and normalcy of service members' sexual lives was a contentious process for military courts throughout the s, s, and early s that resulted in the inconsistent enforcement of the homosexual exclusion policy. Military personnel of all ranks and occupations harbored a variety of attitudes and beliefs about homosexuality that challenged the legitimacy and uniformity of the military's legal assault on sexual deviance. Over half of the active duty personnel originally accused of homosexual tendencies received either sentence reductions or sentence reversals as a result of this highly contested process by which official military policy was translated into practice via courts-martial. Paradoxically, the very policies that discriminated against alleged homosexual service members generated legal avenues through which gays and lesbians exercised their rights to due process, and, ultimately, their rights as American citizens embodied in the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Rather than being an ideologically homophobic monolith, the Cold War American military rocked with contestation over an exclusion policy that attempted--unsuccessfully--to eliminate all gay and lesbian service members.