Expert Doubts Polls Showing Public Favors Homosexuals in Military

by Chad Groening
January 11, 2005

(AgapePress) - A military watchdog says she is skeptical about a recent survey that found 63 percent of Americans favor allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, believes the Gallup poll results came about because too many Americans believe homosexuals are already allowed to serve in the military. "The fact that there is any support at all, or any apparent support for open homosexuality in the military, I'm sure, has a lot to do with the fact that people think that is the situation right now," she says.

Donnelly says she learned how polls can be influenced by pre-conceived notions when she worked with the Roper Center for Public Policy Research in 1992. "They showed us in a very scientific way," she notes, "how you can determine just how much of a given figure is a reflection of people believing a situation already exists, and those that do not. If they believe a situation is not already the case, then their opinions shift quite a bit."

Unfortunately, the CMR spokeswoman says, most Americans are ignorant of the law which currently prohibits homosexuals from serving in the military. And, she contends, there is at least one good reason why so many people already think that homosexual men and lesbian women serve openly in the military: "Most news reports report it that way," she says.

But despite inaccurate media reporting and public misperceptions, Donnelly asserts, "That is inaccurate. There is a law that says homosexuals are not eligible to serve in the military. 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' was rejected by Congress."

In fact, the head of the CMR points out, the much touted "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy is in fact "only a set of regulations that Bill Clinton put in place." That policy, the result of a 1993 compromise reached by President Clinton lengthy and Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sam Nunn (D-Georgia), dictated that military personnel would not be asked about their sexual orientation or discharged simply for their homosexual orientation. However, any sexual conduct with a member of the same sex was still grounds for discharge.

But despite the compromise, in the fall of 1993 Congress voted to codify most aspects of the ban against homosexuals serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, affirming the military's longstanding prohibition as the law of the land.

Donnelly believes the recent Gallup poll would have had a different outcome had respondents known the facts about the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. She says the kind of skewed results the poll actually garnered would go away if President Bush would just get rid of Bill Clinton's confusing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.