Gays in the military? (Maybe) the time has come,

says former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili in a piece in today's New York Times.

Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.

This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

As I discussed in the previous post, these sexual-orientation things are a generational matter. In the 13 years or so since "don't ask, don't tell" was put into place, we've come a long way. At DePauw University, where I teach, it's now pretty much the norm that fraternities welcome openly gay pledges, when even 10 years ago the opposite was true.

Straight teenage men have discovered that they can have warm, close, and even physically affectionate, yet non-sexual, friendships with openly gay friends. Straight and gay men can be friends, and, yes, even take showers together after gym class or playing sports without horrible sexual tension.

What always seemed silly to me about the showers argument was that in nudist subcultures in this country and others, people of all generations have discovered that once you get used to it, being naked doesn't make a situation any more or less sexual than it would be with clothes on. Long ago I read an article on nudists in which a teenager said it was even harder to "get the clothes off" someone in a nudist colony than in clothed communities.

There's another, probably more important force at work here as well (nothing is more important than fairness, of course, but I think this is what will be the deciding factor in changing the policy). From the military perspective, there's really no choice than to end the ban on LGBTQ people serving openly in the military. Why? There are no longer any truly significant societal repercussions for being gay.

Which means that if the draft is reinstituted, which seems less and less improbable as the Iraq situation deteriorates and we face possible conflicts with Iraq and North Korea, there's no disincentive to avoid compulsory military service by claiming to be gay. No need to escape to Canada if you can just say you are turned on by other guys, when employers not only couldn't care less that you got a draft deferment for being gay, but also would give your same-sex partner health and dental benefits.

That's what is going to end this silly policy. With relatively small, peacetime all-volunteer armed services, the resistance to change might still be too intense to overcome. But the top people in the Pentagon must be thinking about a potential draft if we face multiple crises, and the spectre of a virtually unlimited number of young women and men claiming to be gay has got to be a frightening one.