By Daniel Koffler
The Guardian Unlimited UK

When given an opportunity to take a stand against the US military’s discriminatory practices, the Democratic candidates demured.

Tuesday night’s Democratic primary debate in Nevada was as insubstantial as it was soporific – with one exception. Moderator Tim Russert put the following question to all three candidates:

There’s a federal statute on the books which says that, if a college or university does not provide space for military recruiters or provide a ROTC program for its students, it can lose its federal funding.
Will you vigorously enforce that statute?

Posing the question in these terms is tantamount to asking the candidates if they support literacy for children, adoption of stray puppies, apple pie and motherhood. Naturally, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards each took the bait and pledged to enforce the law – before changing the subject and ticking off each item in a litany of (justified) complaints about how the Bush administration has mistreated American war veterans.

Anyone watching the debate who did not know the subtext of Russert’s question would have been utterly baffled as to how such seemingly inarguable legislation could even be opposed, let alone allowed to go unenforced. Presumably, however, the Democratic candidates did know what lay behind the question – the issue of gay rights – which is precisely why they moved on as quickly as possible to unrelated talking points.

Here is the background: the law to which Russert referred is the Solomon Amendment of 1996, a maliciously ingenious little addendum to the US Code that, under the guise of bolstering national security by guaranteeing military recruiters access to the graduates of America’s top schools, seeks to force academic institutions to dismantle their own non-discrimination policies.

The reason that Yale, Harvard, Stanford and almost all other high-prestige universities in the US do not have ROTC programs or allow the military to participate in their career fairs or recruit through their careers websites is that these schools only work with non-discriminatory employers. Because of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which excludes openly gay men and women from military service in any capacity and has led to the unjust dismissal of thousands of qualified soldiers and specialists, universities cannot in good conscience collaborate with military recruiters. (If the military instead excluded Jews or racial minorities from service, there would not be so much as a debate as to whether universities’ civil disobedience is justified.)

In its initial formulation, the Solomon Amendment merely cut off federal funding to any “sub-element” of a university that refused to comply with the policy. But the law has been updated several times, and according to its current incarnation, as of 2001, if any sub-element of a university violates the provisions of the statute, the entire university is deprived of all federal funding. The change is subtle but profound. Previously, if, say, the Yale Law School would not collaborate with JAG recruiters, the only consequence would be a loss of government funding to the law school, a burden any top law school can bear. Under the current Solomon regime, however, the same decision by the law school would completely deprive the Yale chemistry department, the site of fairly significant cancer research, of the federal grants without which it cannot fulfil its mission.

It would be one thing for the government to prohibit schools from barring their students from talking to military recruiters, which no school, in fact, does. The Solomon Amendment goes much further than that. It compels the provision of university resources to the military. Universities are coerced into choosing between either taking an active role in relegating a subset of their students, whom they have a duty to nurture and defend, to second-class status, or else facing crippling losses of revenue. Plainly, in both intent and effect, the Solomon Amendment is pseudo-patriotic blackmail.

Whatever one thinks of the legal arguments of each side in the conflict – the US supreme court has sided with the government, in case anyone was wondering – the case against the substantive merit of the Solomon Amendment is open and shut. First of all, let us put to rest the deceitful canard that the Solomon Amendment has anything to do with protecting national security. Were it not for military discrimination against gay men and women, no university would object to voluntary military recruitment of its students, and consequently there would be no legislation on the matter. The Solomon Amendment only exists because of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, a policy that harms national security, and straightforwardly so. For example, because of the military’s exclusion of homosexuals from service, in the years since September 11 2001 dozens of experts in Arabic and Persian, in whom the army had made considerable investments, were dishonourably discharged. The United States is objectively and obviously less safe as a result.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the academy’s resistance to active participation in the military recruitment of students deprives the military of recruits. On the contrary, while any student who wishes to sign up for military service, or meet recruiters on or near campus, is free to do so, it is a virtual certainty that some highly qualified heterosexual students, who might otherwise be interested in a military career, are turned off to the prospect by the military’s discrimination, further exacerbating the harm “don’t ask, don’t tell” causes to national security.

The upshot of this absurd game of chicken is clear: the policy of the US federal government is to put a higher premium on maintaining the second-class citizenship of gay people than on either protecting US citizens, straight and gay alike, from the real external threats to their safety, or on supporting life-augmenting and life-saving scientific research.

Which leads us back to the Nevada debate and the Democratic candidates for president. By agreeing to enforce the Solomon Amendment, all three of them gave their assent to a policy whose only goal and only achievement is the perpetuation of discrimination against gay men and women.

That Hillary Clinton did so is not altogether surprising – it was her husband, after all, who signed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation into law. But Barack Obama has spoken eloquently before of the injustice of “don’t ask, don’t tell”. On Tuesday night in Las Vegas, however, a night in which the candidates failed to highlight the differences between them, when given the chance to explicitly link enforcement (or more accurately, obsolescence) of the Solomon Amendment to overturning “don’t ask, don’t tell” – ie, the chance to take a principled stand for civil rights, and distinguish himself from his opponent in doing so – Obama declined the opportunity.