Providing for Consideration of H. Con. Res. 36, Expressing Continued Support of Congress for Equal Access of Military Recruters to Institutions of...
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H. CON. RES. 36, EXPRESSING CONTINUED SUPPORT OF CONGRESS FOR EQUAL ACCESS OF MILITARY RECRUITERS TO INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION -- (House of Representatives - February 02, 2005)
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Cole) for yielding me the customary 30 minutes. I also want to welcome him as a new member of the Committee on Rules.
(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, here we are at the start of a new year and a new Congress and we are considering this bill, surprise, surprise, under a closed rule. Once again, the Republican majority has decided that thoughtful debate and the ability for Members to offer amendments if they so wish is unimportant or simply too much bother.
The underlying bill, House Concurrent Resolution 36, was introduced yesterday, has not gone to committee, let alone and be reported out of committee, and was being taken up in the Committee on Rules yesterday just about the time that most Members' planes were touching down in Washington.
So once again the majority has followed its usual practice to stifle debate, prevent amendments, and ignore normal procedure to push a bill to the House floor ahead of more important issues facing the country. Apparently, the Republican leadership could not possibly start the new year out by deciding to finally help the more than one million jobless workers who have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits without receiving additional aid.
I know the majority does not like to be reminded that we still have the largest number of exhaustees in over 3 decades, but the 109th Congress begins still facing this bitter reality and obviously still doing nothing to ease the hardships facing these workers and their families.
Clearly, the Republican majority did not feel it necessary to press the President to get his supplemental request to assist the victims in nations affected by the Asian tsunami quickly before the House, so we are not taking that measure up this week. In fact, we are not likely to act on this most urgent matter until March. But a bill exhorting the White House to ignore and overturn proceedings in the Federal courts and to press higher education institutions to ignore their own policies prohibiting discrimination, well, that is a bill that gets top billing in the House of Representatives today.
Mr. Speaker, in the United States of America discrimination is wrong. Period. But here we are right out of the gate with a bill that condones it. Let us start with a little history on this bill.
In the mid-90s, Congress passed legislation to deny Defense Department funding to colleges and universities that fail to give military recruiters access to their campuses and students. Known as the Solomon Law, that legislation was passed to respond to efforts by several colleges and universities to protest the discriminatory policies of the Pentagon against gay men and women. Over time, the law was expanded to prohibit funding a university might receive from nearly every Federal agency, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Labor.
Last year this House passed a bill that would have expanded that list to include the CIA and the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy.
Mr. Speaker, there is an irony here. The Congress is holding hostage funds from all of these other Federal agencies to prop up discrimination by the Pentagon. Yet every one of these other Federal agencies has full access to recruitment on college campuses. Why? Because unlike the Department of Defense, no other Federal agencies have policies that encourage discrimination against gay men and women. All of them have employees on their pay rolls. All of these Federal agencies and the U.S. Government and the American people benefit from the research and development programs that take place on these campuses, some of it carried out, no doubt, by gay men and women.
So, Mr. Speaker, where does the Solomon Law stand today?
In November 2003, a U.S. district court in New Jersey upheld the constitutionality of the Solomon Law, but it also determined that the Solomon Law does not give the Pentagon any basis for asserting, as it has in regulations on implementing the Solomon Law, that universities and colleges must give military recruiters the same degree of access to campuses and students provided to other employers.
In November 2004, just this past November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overruled part of the New Jersey District Court's ruling and found the Solomon Law to be in violation of the Constitution. In an appeal brought by a number of schools, mainly graduate schools of law, the court ruled that colleges and universities had a first amendment right to exclude recruiters whose hiring practices discriminated against homosexuals.
The U.S. Department of Justice now plans to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it has asked the appeals court to hold off enforcing the nullification of the Solomon Law until the Supreme Court decides on whether to take up the case or not.
Mr. Speaker, let me point out another irony in this debate today. There is absolutely no lack of equal access for military recruiters and ROTC programs on America's college campuses. What the Pentagon receives is special access, pure and simple. To this day, any other employer, public or private, that fails to meet a school's nondiscrimination policies is banned from employee recruitment on campuses. So the Pentagon receives special access to our colleges and universities.
The Solomon law is about giving the military a special right to discriminate in a way other employers may not.
This sense of Congress resolution once again reinforces and promotes the Pentagon's discriminatory policy and practices to the detriment of all other education institutions and Federal agencies. It further encourages the Federal Government in its pursuit to challenge court rulings that have upheld the first amendment rights of our colleges and universities in their efforts to end prejudice and discrimination.
Mr. Speaker, the final irony of this debate you will hear today are the arguments about the need of the military to recruit the best and brightest students that America has to offer.
I agree with this need, and the way to get there is for the Pentagon to end its policy of discrimination. This would end the conflict between the Pentagon and college policies against discrimination and prejudice. The Pentagon has kicked out over 26 military linguists who were fluent in Arabic or Farsi simply because they were homosexual. That is unconscionable while our military men and women are facing a deadly insurgency in Iraq and continued violence in Afghanistan.
In the past 5 years, in the Army alone, over 3,000 uniformed servicemen and women have been discharged solely because of their sexual orientation. They were munitions experts, linguists, health care workers, infantrymen, tank mechanics, radio operators and active in every field of military endeavor.
Make no mistake about it, right now gay men and women are in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they have likely died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. They serve their Nation just as they have since the founding of the United States, bravely, patriotically and devotedly, but their superiors do not commend their service. If their sexual orientation is discovered, they are drummed out.
Mr. Speaker, there is no lack of access to for the military on America's campuses. Every university that wants an ROTC program has one. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 52,000 college students are enrolled in ROTC programs, up from 48,000 in 2000. Many credit feelings of patriotism engendered by the September 11 attacks, and it comes as no surprise that military enlistment by college graduates has also increased since the events of September 11.
Mr. Speaker, we do not need the Solomon law. We do not need the bill before us today, and we certainly do not need to continue to insult and assault those very institutions of higher education that are leading the way to end hate and discrimination in America.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, before I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas, I just want to respond to my colleague from Oklahoma.
He mentioned that this resolution has been posted on the Web site for 3 days or 4 days. I should say to him that that is not a substitute for the committee process. That is why we have committees.
Secondly, I am glad that the gentleman believes that the bill needs no amendment, but there are 434 other Members of this House that should have the opportunity to amend this bill, if they so desire.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks, and include extraneous material.)
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I insert in the RECORD at this point two articles. One is an editorial from the New York Times entitled, ``The Price of Homophobia.'' Another is an Associate Press story entitled, ``Report: Number of gay linguists discharged higher than thought.''
[From the New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005]
The Price of Homophobia
Don't ask, don't tell--just scream in frustration: it turns out that 20 of the Arabic speakers so vitally needed by the nation have been thrown out of the military since 1998 because they were found to be gay. It is hard to imagine a more wrongheaded rebuff of national priorities. The focus must be on the search for Osama bin Laden and his terrorist legions, not the closet door. The Pentagon's snooping after potential gays trumps what every investigative agency in the war on terror has admitted is a crucial shortage of effective Arabic translators.
After the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993, government agents revealed an alarming shortage of Arabic speakers. Key notes, videotapes and a phone call pertaining to the attack were later found in a backlog of untranslated investigative data. The shortage continued right up to and well beyond the 9/11 attacks. Three years after the towers were destroyed, the F.B.I., rife with translation problems, admitted it had an untranslated backlog of 120,000 hours of intercepts with potential value about looming threats. At the State Department, a study showed that only one in five of the 279 Arabic translators were fluent enough to handle the subtleties of the language, with its many regional dialects.
The military's experience is no more encouraging, with intelligence results muddied at times by a rush, as one inquiry put it, to recruit Arab convenience store owners and cabdrivers, who couldn't handle the task. The military is right to rely more on its language schools, but it can take several years to produce fluent graduates. The folly of using ``don't ask, don't tell'' policy against such precious national resources amounts to comfort for the enemy. When President Bush was asked last week by The Washington Post why Osama bin Laden had eluded capture, he replied, ``Because he's hiding.'' So is the Pentagon--it's hiding from reality.
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[From Associated Press, January 13, 2005]
Report: Number of Gay Linguists Discharged Higher Than Thought
(By Kim Curtis)
San Francisco (AP)--The number of Arabic linguists discharged from the military for violating its ``don't ask, don't tell'' policy was nearly three times as high as previously reported, according to records obtained by an advocacy group.
Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi speakers, according to Department of Defense data obtained by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military under a Freedom of Information Act request.
The military previously confirmed that seven translators who specialized in Arabic had been discharged because they were gay. The updated numbers were first reported by The New Republic magazine.
Aaron Belkin, the center's director, said he wants the public to see the real costs of ``don't ask, don't tell.''
``We had a language problem after 9/11 and we still have a language problem,'' Belkin said Wednesday.
The military's ``don't ask, don't tell'' policy allows gays and lesbians to serve in the military as long as they keep their sexual orientation private and do not engage in homosexual acts.
But Belkin and other advocates say such a policy endangers national security at a time U.S. intelligence agencies and the military say they don't have enough Arabic speakers.
``The military is placing homophobia ahead of national security,'' said Steve Ralls, spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a nonprofit group which advocates for the rights of gay military members. ``It's appalling that in the weeks leading up to 9/11 messages were coming in waiting to be translated ..... and at the same time they were firing people who could've done that job.''
But others, like Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative advocacy group that opposes gays serving in the military, said the discharged linguists never should have been accepted at the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey in the first place.
``Resources unfortunately were used to train young people who were not eligible to be in the military,'' she said. ``We need to recruit people who are eligible to serve.''
In the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2004, 543 Arabic linguists and 166 Farsi linguists graduated from their 63-week courses, according to a DLI spokesman. That was up from 377 and 139, respectively, in the previous year, reflecting the military's increased need for translators in Iraq.
Experts have identified the shortage of Arabic linguists as contributing to the government's failure to predict the Sept. 11 attacks. The independent Sept. 11 commission made similar conclusions. The government ``lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other key languages'' to adequately prepare itself against future strikes, the report said.
``It used to be this was seen as a gay rights issue, but now it's clearly a national security issue,'' said Nathaniel Frank, a senior research fellow at the Center for Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Ian Finkenbinder, a U.S. Army Arabic linguist who graduated from the Defense Language Institute in 2002, was discharged from the military last month after announcing to his superiors that he's gay. Finkenbinder, who said his close friends in the Army already knew he was gay, served eight months in Iraq and was about to return for a second tour when he made the revelation official.
``I looked at myself and said, `Are you willing to go to war with an institution that won't recognize that you have the right to live as you want to,' '' said Finkenbinder, 22, who now lives in Baltimore, Md. ``It just got to be tiresome to deal with that--to constantly have such a significant part of your life under scrutiny.''
Finkenbinder said his commander was upset to let him go because his Arabic proficiency was at the highest possible for a nonnative speaker.
The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network last month sued the government on behalf of 12 gay former military members seeking reinstatement. They're seeking to overturn ``don't ask, don't tell'' alleging it violates their constitutional rights.
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).
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