Remember when being gay was considered the worst type of security risk?
By John Gallagher · Monday, May 15, 2017
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Remember when being gay was considered the worst type of security risk? While the arguments about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hewed to the red herring of “unit cohesion,” the underlying theme was that gay service members were a security risk, an argument made by the GOP for decades to prevent LGBTQ people from serving their country.
The closet supposedly made them vulnerable to blackmail by foreign powers. Fearful of having their secret exposed, gay servicemembers would supposedly be willing to betray their country rather than have the truth come out.
That argument dates back to the 1950s. It was explicitly used during the Lavender Scare witch hunts of the McCarthy era to dismiss thousands of gay and lesbian government employees. During that time, supporters of the purge insisted on the connection between homosexuality and communism (aka, Russia). Senator McCarthy insisted that communists and gay men were dual “threats to the American way of life,” while another senator claimed that “you can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives.” (Of course, McCarthy’s right hand man was Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man who went on to mentor Donald Trump in scuzziness.)
The military took this argument to heart with a vengeance. Over the decades, as many as 100,000 people were thrown out of the military only for being gay.
Ironically, one of the first cracks in the argument came from then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 1991. Cheney described the ban on gays in the military as a policy he inherited and said that the security risk argument behind it was “a bit of an old chestnut.” That didn’t stop the military from purging gay and lesbian service members, even after they were ostensibly protected by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
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https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/05/remember-gay-considered-worst-type-security-risk/
