The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) - Firewire News Case Study: The Military Murders

The National Council on Identity Policy (NCIDP) was born of the struggles of one tenacious survivor of domestic violence and stalking. The NCIDP continues her work with the help of many. Read more about the NCIDP...

UPDATE: On September 20, 2011, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was repealed, and is expected to mark the end of the decades-long, shameful legacy of official bigotry and violent oppression of the millions of honorable lesbian and gay servicemembers that serve and have served in the United States Armed Forces. It appears, however, that those members continue to be subjected to discrimination in their relationships and benefits, and this only marks the end of an official prohibition of their honorable service, not the end of all official discrimination.

(Firewire News) – It is U.S. Military policy to prohibit safe access to services and resources for certain victims of domestic violence. In short, it is U.S. Military policy to encourage the murders of those same service members.

This policy invariably, unavoidably, deepens, intensifies and pushes to extremes the violence that those selected members experience; a policy that minimizes these victims' chances to survive on the home front.

For many, this means that the dangers of combat zones are well overshadowed by the intimate dangers at home.

This homicidal U.S. Military policy originates in paradigms that date back to the earlier aristocratic English Common Law premises of "manhood" [see: The History of Birth Certificates and Identity] and a period when only men were conscripted or expected to serve. By this ancient tradition, only the full capacity to sire children to whom to pass down the patrilineage made a person truly male, and thereby even those who might otherwise be men for their fertility were not men if they were homosexual. [See: The History of Birth Certificates and Identity]. (Ironically, however, the armies of the ancient Greeks, the oft-declared 'birthplace' of democracy, generally regarded homosexual soldiers as normal and typical).

Although the Unites States rebuked, at its founding, the aristocratic system, and modernly all legal concepts of identity revolve around self-determination and prohibitions on third party dictations of identity [see: The History of Birth Certificates and Identity] , the U.S. Military has preserved within its own microcosm this feudal and eugenicist tyranny upon identities.

In so doing, the U.S. Military has chosen to participate in the murders of many of its own, and particularly in the domestic violence and domestic violence murders of its own. Assaults, rapes, terroristic violence, blackmail – no safe means of obtaining help or justice is available to victimized members of the military if they happen to be gay or lesbian.

By its own policy, the U.S. Military has empowered the abusive partners of lesbian and gay service members to be more brutal and more likely to escalate to homicide. Simultaneously, this U.S. Military policy has disempowered those victimized members in any efforts that they might make to break that cycle, break free from that violence, or call out for any help at all.

To dial 911 is to end a devoted career.

Barred access to more than just first responders, however, such service members are barred access to social services for victims of violence, legal services for victims of violenc e, and even medical attention for injuries clearly related to violence. All such services, provided by the U.S. Military, lack any confidentiality for those members, and accessing those services in relation to any same-sex domestic abuse means the end of a devoted career.

Leaving an abusive partner is not an option for many of these victims, even less so than those not serving: their partners often openly flaunt their power over the service member, violently threatening to call their victim's commanding officer and 'out' their victim, destroy their victim's career, if the victim tries to leave – or even if the perpetrator has the merest whim to do so.

For decades, such an end to a military career meant a particularly bad end – a Dishonorable Discharge.

In more recent years, legislation was enacted during the Clinton administration formalizing in law the discrimination that had previously been strictly a matter of military regulation. This legislatively enacted discrimination became known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT). The destruction of the careers of gay and lesbian members increased under this new law, rather than decreased as had been intended, due to discriminatory abuses of it, including the abusive power that it continued to provide to abusive partners and ex-partners of service members.

Many United States military service members have died, many more have been severely injured, as a result of these violent policies, in numbers far greater than reports of such cases within the ranks reflect. When a fellow service member kills their own based upon any perception of being gay or lesbian, it might be recognized as hate violenc e, closely tied to the official approval of such attitudes of hate such as DADT. But when an abusive intimate partner kills a service member left defenseless by those same official policies of hate, it's roots in the policies of hate such as DADT are universally overlooked in statistical studies.

But those service members are still dead or injured, and DADT and other policies of official hate paved the path to that lethality.

UPDATE: The Pentagon has released (November 30, 2010) it's own review of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, recommending that DADT be repealed and service members be able to serve openly.

The National Council on Identity Policy vigorously supports the end of DADT and all other homophobic military policy and, further, ardently believes that the historical cases of other than Honorable discharges of LGBT service members should be corrected to Honorable. The wrongs done to such service members in the past deserves to be undone to the greatest extent possible.

The founder of The National Council on Identity Policy was an honorably served, Honorably Discharged veteran who felt, even while serving, that discrimination against her gay and lesbian comrades-in-arms was wrong, was a disservice to those who served, and a disservice to the nation and the military itself. The Pentagon has now, finally, recognized this.

UPDATE: The world remains in waiting for the end Don't ask Don't Tell (DADT) in the U.S. military. President Obama, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must "certify" that ending the policy will not harm military readiness. Until then, the law ending Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT), signed on December 22, 2010, does not come into force, and DADT remains in place. The entirety of the process ignores the harm to readiness that DADT itself has caused, and the innumerable lives lost to it and the homophobic regulations that preceded it.