Volokh on the (il)logic of excluding gays from the military

Excluding lesbians isn’t justified by any of the usual arguments for excluding gay men. Yet everyone who supports the latter supports the former. Howcum?

Eugene Volokh shows that none of the usual justifications for excluding gay men from the military extend to gay women. Yet as far as I can tell the set of people who want to exclude gay men but not gay women from service is empty.

Since I’m a rude liberal policy analyst rather than a polite libertarian law professor, I’ll draw the conclusion Eugene merely implies: the basis for DADT and its predecessor policies is bigotry. If you didn’t think gay people were icky, you wouldn’t want to keep them out of the service.

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com