At about the 4:15 mark, Robert Gibbs responds to a question about whether the Obama administration will get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“You don’t hear a politician give a one-word answer much,” Gibbs said. “But the answer’s ‘yes.'”
You could make an argument against codifying bigotry on moral grounds, but it seems like the most compelling argument against doing so is pragmatic; it just makes shit run inefficiently. During World War II, the U.S. Army was drafting black men by the thousands — doctors, pilots, and architects among them — only to relegate them to being cooks or send them into the jungles of Burma to crush rocks because the Army had a policy of not letting whites and blacks serve together. It was a complete misapplication/waste of manpower and talent.
So it is with this policy. The Army has had trouble recruiting for most of the war (though it has been doing better lately), but it has been kicking out soldiers — over 11,000 since the policy’s implementation in 1993 through 2006 — including those with incredibly vital skills.
