Being gay isn’t enough to get kicked out (xpost from Veterans)

[unhappycamper]

Maj. Margaret Witt
Tip-off into her sexuality ended her career


Being gay isn’t enough to get kicked out
By Patrick Winn - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday May 22, 2008 21:34:46 EDT

By all accounts, Maj. Margaret Witt didn’t ask and definitely didn’t tell. The highly decorated flight nurse, a literal poster girl featured on Air Force promotional materials, preferred to keep her job intact and her sexuality quiet.

Then came a tip-off to her command that unraveled Witt’s 19-year career and set into motion a lawsuit that could threaten the Defense Department’s ban on homosexuals in uniform. Witt’s legal challenge to her dismissal from the Air Force, at first dismissed by federal courts, has been revived by judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The military, a trio of the appellate judges ruled May 21, cannot dismiss service members just because they’re gay.

Commanders, they said, must prove the person’s homosexuality harms unit cohesion by questioning others in the unit, a process the justices themselves derided as a distraction — and likely a privacy violation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision to nullify Texas sodomy laws.

“When the government attempts to intrude upon the personal and private lives of homosexuals,” Judge Ronald M. Gould wrote, “the government must advance an important governmental interest, the intrusion must significantly further that interest, and the intrusion must be necessary to further that interest.”


Rest of article at: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/05/airforce_dontask_052208/

[Creideiki]

1. I just wish it wasn't the 9th Court

It gets overturned an awful lot.