State Dept. may hire gays fired by Defense
Arabic linguists were axed under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
By ELIZABETH A. PERRY Friday, February 16, 2007
An official from the U.S. State Department called Rep. Gary Ackerman’s (D-N.Y.) office Feb. 7 to tell him they were considering his suggestion to rehire some of the gay linguists discharged from the military under the Defense Department’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Ackerman, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discussed the issue during the State Department’s 2008 budget hearing on Feb. 7. During her testimony, Rice expressed concern about the lack of qualified linguists in the armed forces. Ackerman, a longtime opponent of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” suggested having the State Department hire back gay linguists, because unlike the Defense Department, it doesn’t have such a policy.
“It seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages such as Farsi, Arabic, etc., after they trained them in their foreign language school for 63 weeks,” Ackerman said. “Presumably they all passed all kinds of security clearances. Many of them told on themselves and were fired.”
Rice told Ackerman she would look into it. She said
the military has quadrupled the number of employees in the critical languages area, but that they would like to train them to higher levels of competence.
Ackerman used the hearing to humorously address homophobia in the military.
“For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are of terrorists,” he said. “They’re very brave with the terrorists. If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information they could get a
platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.”
Should those homosexuals terminated because of their lifestyle be expected to "forgive and forget" and come running back to save the administration that canned them??
That would be a decision requiring a lot of thoughtful contemplation . . . .
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