Asking Different Questions in a “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” Army

Ian Ayres and Jennifer Brown

Imagine that every soldier upon entering the military was asked a simple question.

Would you prefer to serve in a command without any gay personnel?

Soldiers would know that if they answer “No” they would be assigned to an “inclusive” command, and that if they answer “Yes” they would be assigned to an “exclusive” command.

Asking this question does not violate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because it does not ask a soldier about his or her own sexual orientation. But it nonetheless is likely to promote a kind of voluntary integration in the inclusive command. In an essay just published in the Michigan law review, we argue that:

The benefits of the inclusive units would be threefold: amelioration (of current
discrimination), demonstration (that DADT is not necessary to preserve unit
cohesion), and realignment of political allies and enemies (creating a common
cause for pro-gay legislators on the left and pro-defense legislators on the
right). The proposal is dynamic, not static. The hope is that inclusive commands
would so effectively demonstrate the benefits of integration that, over time,
increasing numbers of service members would opt for integrated units. From
there, the step to universal, mandatory integration of sexual minorities into
the armed forces would be smaller and more easily taken.

The inclusive command idea is a particular example of two themes that we explore in a variety of contexts in our forthcoming book, Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights:
First, there are often valuable incremental strategies between seeming intractable dichotomies. And second, heterosexual allies often play a crucial role in effectuating these strategies.