Lift the Ban, General Powell

It's been a while since Harvard's Commencement has been blessed with a protest other than Law School graduates' annual melee with their dean. Today's demonstrations, however, are welcome and justified--because our speaker, General Colin L. Powell, subscribes to government-sanctioned discrimination in the form of the military's ban on gays and lesbians.

We think the prohibition on gays is despicable--as unconscionable as the treatment gays and lesbians have received if they've made their sexual orientation known within the military. We had hoped that President Clinton would be able to fulfill his election promise and eliminate the ban through an executive order. But military leaders were intent on impeding Clinton's civil rights goal. Powell, sitting at the military's helm, has acquiesced to their demands.

When President Harry S. Truman embarked on a desegregation of the army--not long after the Class of 1943 graduated from Harvard--Americans heard many of the same arguments we hear today in opposition to lifting the ban on gays. It would cause disruption. It would lead to fights. It would lower morale. It would present the armed forces from operating efficiently.

Fifty years later, those dissenters have been proven wrong. And the fact that their arguments have reemerged only accentuates how misguided those arguments are. The recent justifications for intolerance--such as the division of minority groups into categories of "behavioral" and "inherent" traits--are based solely on fear and misunderstanding. They only perpetuate the idea of "them" we thought this government aimed to eradicate.

Twenty-five years ago, interestingly enough, the issues were different. When the class of 1968 was in college, antimilitarism was a popular cause, and students questioned the level of involvement Harvard should have with the military establishment. Recent debate over ROTC does not focus on when Harvard should be connected to a military program it all, a consuming question in the late 1960's. Today those we oppose the ROTC program think Harvard should sever ties with an organization whose selective discrimination violates University policies.

Although the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been reluctant to do so, think Harvard should take a stand and dissociate itself from a discriminatory program. Until the military allows. Americans to serve in ROTC, Harvard shouldn't support that program. The University should send a message that intolerance is unacceptable, that it is un-American.

Harvard has a message to send today, a message to General Powell and others who cling irrationally to an antiquated, discriminatory stance:

Move away from the past; lift the ban, and step into the future--a future in which all Americans, gay or straight, are treated equally.