New Endorsements For Executive Order On Gay Troops

Center for American Progress and Robert Shrum Join Call for "Stop-Loss" Order

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., June 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Center for
American Progress (CAP) has issued a five-step plan for repealing "don't ask,
don't tell" that begins with an executive order suspending gay discharges.

According to the report, "President Obama should issue an order prohibiting
the Secretary of Defense... from establishing, implementing, or applying any
personnel or administrative policies, or taking a personnel or administrative
action, in whole or part on the basis of sexual orientation." The report says
that this would "include banning further dismissals on the basis of DADT."
The legal basis for issuing such an order derives from the president's
"stop-loss" authority.

The plan is contained in a new CAP report called "Ending 'Don't Ask, Don't
Tell': Practical Steps to Repeal the Ban on Openly Gay Men and Women in the
U.S. Military," and was written by Lawrence J. Korb, Sean E. Duggan, and Laura
Conley.

Robert Shrum, a Democratic party elder statesman, has said that President
Obama already should have issued an executive order on gay troops. Obama
could have maintained "credibility among gays," Shrum said, "if he had issued
a 'stop-loss' order ending the discharge of gay service members while allowing
the Pentagon to proceed with a longer-term review of the 'don't ask, don't
tell' policy. The president could have justified this on grounds of military
need." Shrum's remarks appeared in yesterday's edition of The Week.

Other prominent voices calling for an executive order include the Human Rights
Campaign, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, and Knights Out, an
organization of West Point graduates co-founded by Lt. Dan Choi, the Arabic
translator about to be discharged because he's gay. The New York Times
editorial page has said that President Obama should consider signing an
executive order.

Seventy-seven members of Congress stopped short of calling for an executive
order in a letter to Obama this week, but urged the White House instead to
issue a moratorium suspending gay discharges from the military. Today, the
White House responded to the Congressional letter by reiterating the
President's commitment to legislative repeal at some future point rather than
an immediate administrative suspension.

Aaron Belkin, Palm Center director, questioned the logic of that statement.
"The White House acts as if an executive order and legislative repeal are
mutually exclusive options," he said. "The whole point of the executive order
is that it untangles the political stalemate and paves the way for legislative
repeal."

The idea of ending the ban by executive order gained momentum after the
release last month of a Palm Center study showing that the president has the
authority to suspend "don't ask, don't tell" with the stroke of a pen. Before
that, many argued that only Congress or the courts could lift the ban on
service by openly gay troops.

The Palm Center is a research institute at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. The Center uses rigorous social science to inform public discussions
of controversial social issues, enabling policy outcomes to be informed more
by evidence than by emotion. Its data-driven approach is premised on the
notion that the public makes wise choices on social issues when high-quality
information is available. For more information, visit
www.palmcenter.ucsb.edu.

SOURCE The Palm Center

Indra Lusero, Assistant Director, Palm Center, +1-805-893-5664,
lusero@palmcenter.ucsb.edu