A Modest Proposal: Privacy as a Flawed Rationale for the Exclusion of Gays and Lesbians from the U.S. Military

Abstract

The justification for excluding acknowledged homosexuals from the U.S. military is the unit cohesion rationale, the notion that lifting the gay ban would undermine combat performance. As a growing body of evidence has challenged the plausibility of this argument, the ban’s supporters increasingly have justified exclusion by the preservation of heterosexual privacy in the barracks and showers. We argue that lifting the gay ban will not undermine heterosexual privacy. Heterosexual service members already shower with known homosexuals, and lifting the ban is unlikely to increase the number of open gays significantly. Few heterosexual service members are extremely uncomfortable around homosexuals, and discomfort that does exist will diminish after lifting the ban. Finally, same-sex sexual encounters would occur even if all homosexuals were eliminated from the military. We conclude that the ban itself enables systematic invasions of heterosexual privacy. Hence, experts who seek to protect heterosexual privacy should advocate its removal. Aaron Belkin and Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert Aaron Belkin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamline University. We are very grateful to the Editors of International Security as well as two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful and thoughtful reactions. In addition, we appreciate the feedback of Jeffery M. Cleghorn, Michael Clune, Christopher Dandeker, Lynn Eden, Robert Goldich, Gregory Herek, Danny Kaplan, Charles Moskos, C. Dixon Osburn, Stacey Sobel, John Allen Williams and panel participants and audience members at Boston College Law School, Tulane University Law School, the Commonwealth Club of California, and the 2001 meetings of the Inter-University Seminar in Baltimore. For excellent research support, we thank Danielle Brown, Andrea Ebreck, and Maya