Related to Solomon Amendment

[Annie]

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_11_27-2005_12_03.shtml#1133402173

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

[David Bernstein, November 30, 2005 at 8:56pm] 4 Trackbacks / Possibly More Trackbacks
Congress's Responsibility for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell":
With the caveat that, as I've mentioned before, I dislike the Solomon Amendment, and think it is in fact "coercive" to deprive some schools of their lifeblood federal funding while granting such funds to their competitors, Dean Polsby raises a good point in his latest Solomon Amendment debate post on the ACS blog. The military's anti-gay "policy" is actually a statute that the military is obligated to follow. If the law schools want to express their displeasure at the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law, it would arguably make more sense to cut off recruiting ties with Congress (and the Executive branch, given that the president signed the law, and the judiciary, which has upheld the law). It would also be a much more courageous and costly act on the part of the elite law schools, which send very few students to the military, but many to other parts of the government.
Of course, one could argue that it would be foolish to boycott all three branches of government, considering that much of what they do has nothing to do with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." But consider that not only is Don't Ask Don't Tell a law, not simply a "policy," but that the military is engaged in several shooting wars right now, one can also question how much weight one should give "Don't Ask Don't Tell" in the broader scheme of things, even if one thinks it's a terrible, invidious policy. A hypothetical: would it have been morally appropriate for law schools to ban military recruiters during World War II because of military segregation and discrimination, or would it have been morally superior to cooperate with the military and provide needed talent for WWII, while still urging the political branches to change the military's policies (as Truman eventually did in 1948)? If any of the leading advocates of boycotting military recruiters have seriously grappled with the moral implications of doing so in the midst of major military conflict with truly awful enemies, I haven't noticed it (indeed, I asked a dean of a leading law school, in response to a letter urging my support of the FAIR litigation, about whether the fact that this is wartime gave him any pause at all, and did not receive a response). My colleague Eugene Kontorovich, unlike me a Solomon Amendment supporter, has written about related legal ethics issues. To return to a theme I've focused on elsewhere, antidiscrimination concerns are certainly important, but they do not always trump other competing values.

UPDATE: My GMU colleague Ilya Somin tells me that when people criticized Joe Louis for recruiting blacks to join the then-segregated military during WWII, he responded along the lines of "the things wrong with the US won't be made better by letting Hitler win."

FURTHER UPDATE: Louis's actual remark: "[t]here may be a whole lot wrong with America, but there's nothing that Hitler can fix." Ilya adds: "The analogy is apt because just as Hitler's views on race were a whole lot worse than those of the WWII military, our current enemies' position on homosexuality is a whole lot worse than that of the Pentagon."
ONE MORE UPDATE: U. Minnesota professor Dale Carpenter, in the Minnesota Daily: "In my view, that’s [the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] a red herring. This is an ideological hostility on the part of Congress toward universities that want to protect gay people from discrimination." (1) I don't see how it's a red herring to point out that law schools wish to obstruct military recruiting in the middle of wartime. (2) And why take it out on the military recruiters, who have no choice but to obey Congress's order? Why not refuse cooperation with Congress? Not to pick on Minnesota, because this sort of thing is going on at all the law schools that are up in arms about the Solomon Amendment, but Senator Norm Coleman, presumably a Solomon (and Don't Ask, Don't Tell?) supporter, was the commencement speaker at Minnesota last year, yet military recruiters, adhering to legislation passed by Coleman's cohorts, shouldn't be allowed to use the law school's bulletin boards? (Lest there be any doubt, I'm not being facetious here; I very much respect the opposition to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," but don't understand why it's okay to honor the likes of Coleman but not okay to even tolerate military recruiters in wartime.)

Related Posts (on one page):

Carpenter Responds:
Congress's Responsibility for "Don't Ask, Don't Tell":
Very Much Precedented Tying of Federal Aid to Colleges to Obeying Government Rules:
ACSBlog Debate On Solomon Amendment Case: