Legal News

Yale Law Students, Dean on March Against ?Don?t Ask, Don?t Tell?

By Dan Slater

Earlier this summer, we told you that Vermont Law School was taking a stand against the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy — and paying for it. The school, whose endowment is about $14 million, could be denied federal research money to the tune of $300,000 to $500,000. (Hopefully, this won’t affect the school’s keg-tossing contest.)

But Yale University isn’t willing to risk it. This is reportedly the second year the school has relented and allowed military recruiters to avail themselves of the formal interview process Yale arranges for employers willing to sign a non-discriminatory hiring pledge. Military recruiters from the Navy and Air Force were the only personnel out of some 70 employers who failed to do this.

But there was indignation from at least one quarter of Yale’s student body. According to the New Haven Register, three dozen students, dressed in interview attire and gagged, marched from the law school to a nearby hotel Wednesday to protest the policy, which allows gays to join the military as long as they don’t make known their sexual orientation, a situation that has reportedly led to the dismissal of some 12,500 service members since 1994.

Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh came out at the beginning of the protest and read from the 2006 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, which allows for the financial penalties. Still, Koh made clear he didn’t like it. “On ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ people have said gays serving next to straights disrupt unit cohesion,” Koh reportedly said. “In Europe they have served next to each other for years. Their units seem pretty cohesive. … In the U.N. forces, American soldiers serve next to openly gay soldiers — they have pretty good unit cohesion. There are ways we can test and challenge the empirical accuracy of these assertions.”

Craig Konnoth, a Yale law student who helped organize the protest, said, “At the end of the day, the rationale for this policy is supposed to be the morale of the military. But I just don’t think that you show solidarity through witchhunts of people’s sexuality.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 03, 2008 (boomark / email).