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June 26, 2007

Congressmen urge State Department to reinstate gay linguists

Congressmen urge State Department to reinstate gay linguists

Two U.S. congressmen have sent letters to Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, calling for the State Department to act quickly to rehire language-qualified soldiers dismissed from the armed services because they are gay.

Democrats Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Gary Ackerman, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, referred to the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, under which the linguists were discharged, as "one of the most regressive, counterproductive policies we could ever imagine."

"We are writing to urge the Department of State to take a specific step," they wrote, "the hiring of our unfairly dismissed, language-qualified soldiers—so our nation might salvage something positive from the lamentable results of this benighted policy."

The congressmen also note that statistics from the Government Accountability Office on the military's ban on openly gay service members show that more than 300 soldiers with critical foreign language skills, including fluency in Persian and Arabic, have been dismissed from the military. Now many of those gay and lesbian linguists have gone to work for contractors, who sell their services back to the U.S. government, marking up the price for taxpayers.

"While we lament our government's anachronistic and short-sighted adherence to the bigoted 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, we see no reason why our nation's diplomatic mission should suffer for the military's lack of vision. We hope you will agree." (The Advocate)

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