For ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ Split on Party Lines

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The presidential candidates are dividing starkly along party lines on one of the signature fights of the 1990s: whether the 14-year-old policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be repealed and gay men and lesbians allowed to serve openly in the military.

In back-to-back debates in New Hampshire this week, every Democratic candidate raised his or her hand in support of repealing that policy, while not a single Republican embraced the idea. Democrats argued with striking unanimity that it was time to end the uneasy compromise that President Bill Clinton reached in 1993, after his attempt to lift the ban on gay men and lesbians in the military provoked one of the most wrenching fights of his young administration.

Republicans countered that the policy should not be changed, certainly not in time of war.


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Democratic leaders have been moving away from “don’t ask, don’t tell” for some time now; Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York renounced the policy in 1999, when she was first running for the Senate. In the 2000 presidential primary campaign, the two leading Democrats, Vice President Al Gore and Senator Bill Bradley, also called for the policy’s repeal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/us/politics/08gays.html?hp