Why does the argument against gays in the military always come down to sharing foxholes, sleeping quarters or sleeping bags?

Because that’s where “good order and discipline” are affected: in normal, everyday living.

As Foxfier & Thus Spake Ortner noted previously, having a gay service member or even just someone thought to be gay, can be disruptive. For the most part, service members are NOT fully mature adults: they’re young, and they often act like it. (Which was always the problem for me in introducing women aboard ships: not that they can’t be very effective sailors, but that its difficult enough to keep a gang of young guys focused on a job and adding girls to the mix…anyway).

In practice, I think DADT works as well as could be expected. Folks who want to serve, who would otherwise be rejected, can. Folks who might have objections don’t have to know, and life goes on.

And in spite of ParatrooperJJ’s comment:

One thing most people forget is that if DADT disapears, then the services will have no choice but to court martial gays. That means a federal felony conviction, prision time, and a BCD or DD.

that just simply isn’t true. Many homosexuals served well and honorably before DADT, so even if it were to go away there isn’t any reason gays couldn’t continue to do so. As a practical matter, the “DA” part of “DADT” isn’t going to go away any time soon.

JJ, @ #48…
Since the services are treating adultery as a criminal act, why the complete silence from the Left on this aspect of Military Justice?
Are sexual acts between consenting heterosexual adults bad, but between consenting homosexual adults good?
Curious minds want to know.

No basis either way. The federal one makes no mention of race, yet you tell me that it has everything to do with that. There’s no indication that CA divined that the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection’ meant that it had ‘everything to do with race’ like you do.

XRLQ: why should the California court address the federal constitution at all if (a) the litigants haven’t raised that claim and/or (b) interpreting the California Constitution is sufficient to dispose of the case?

Because the issues are exactly the same. The substantially identical equal provisions of the two constitutions are not an historical accident; rather, the framers of the CA provision made a deliberate choice to copy the federal one. There is absolutely no basis, either in history or in the California constitution itself, for suggesting that the latter provision was intended to be construed more broadly (or in any way differently) than the federal one upon which it was obviously based. That’s why the CA SC had no qualms about citing federal 14th Amendment cases to justify its ruling.

My understanding is that courts are supposed to make decisions on the narrowest grounds possible. Surely saying that something violates the state Constitution is narrower than saying the same thing violates the federal Constitution; and once you’ve reached one violation, you no longer need the other.

By that logic, very few state court decisions would apply the federal constitution at all. Every state has its own equivalent of the First Amendment, most have some version of the Second, etc., so why not routinely dismiss all federal issues unless there is a clear basis for ruling that two will conflict (e.g, if the CA constitution purports to allow something the federal one would prohibit)? It’s an interesting theory, but it’s not how these cases are typically argued or decided. It just happened that way here because the plaintiffs knew that if the case was decided under federal law, and therefore reviewable by federal courts, they would lose.

Other than that, there is nothing about “a person may not be … denied equal protection of the laws” that is any broader (thereby making a finding of a violation narrower) than “no State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” If each had its own separate history, and the similarities in their verbiage were a coincidence, there might be some justification for holding that one covers gay marriage while the other does not. But you and I both know that is not the case. The only “state constitution” issue is the political reality that when state courts limit themselves to peeing in their own sandboxes, the federal courts generally leave them alone. [Bush v. Gore is the exception that proves the rule. There you had a clear case of a state supreme court issuing a ruling that no conceivable reading of its own statutes would bear. The US SC basically ignored that fact, ruling on equal protection grounds instead.]

I can’t find your trackback URL anymore; so I’m posting to note that I argued with some of the explicit and implicit conclusions you drew in this post, while agreeing with others, in “Patterico and Gay Soldiers: Strict vs. Rational – Liberty vs. Privilege” on Big Lizards.

Dafydd