
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 27, 1993                   TAG: 9307290457
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COMPROMISING ON MORE THAN A PROMISE

I MUST express my sympathy for President Clinton who was stuck between a rock and a hard place on his honorable compromise regarding gays and lesbians in the military. The rock was his campaign committment to lift the ban on gays and lesbians in the military; the hard place is the military.

I don't sympathize, however, with the compromise itself. This is not because I don't believe in compromises. The reality of politics is such that compromise is inevitable if government is to move and not become stagnate. My concern is the precedent set by this compromise and the ramifications of this compromise.

By allowing a don't ask, don't tell policy, the government has given the military a permit to practice qualified discrimination. Under this policy the military is still allowed to prosecute/discharge anyone who is openly gay or lesbian. What this establishes is a model for other possible forms of qualified discrimination, whether in the military or in other public services or agencies. In a nation that is built upon lofty principles of democracy, equality and justice, opening the doors to this form of legalized discrimination, as this policy does, is a hard blow against these principles.

But more disturbing than even this implied threat to our democratic principles is the explicit role of the military in establishing social policy for its citizens. In allowing this compromise to stand we are allowing the military to directly influence how we as a nation are to treat and value a significant social group within our society; i.e. gays and lesbians are not to be treated as equal to the rest of us. Even though the military is not an elected political body its power within our society to establish social attitudes and to blackmail the democratic integrity of our society is frighteningly apparent in this compromise.

I fear that in this compromise President Clinton has more than compromised on a campaign promise. In the realm of democratic politics, this can be excused. What cannot be excused or tolerated is to hand over political authority, and the power to establish social policy, to the military, thereby compromising the inherent power of we the people. REV. KIRK A. BALLIN ROANOKE

by CNB