Brentology.com

Discrimination Costs

by Libby Post

Discriminating against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community doesn’t come cheap.
According to the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California/Santa Barbara, the government spent $363 million purging the military of lesbian and gay soldiers in the ten years since Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been in effect. In that decade, 1994 through 2003, more than 10,000 true-blue, dedicated soldiers and other military personnel have been thrown out of the armed forces just because of who they love.
We’re not just talking guys and girls in army greens who are supposedly building democracy in war-torn Iraq. We're talking about 55 Arabic and 9 Farsi interpreters who were fired by the Army because of their sexual orientation. We're talking about 244 doctors, nurses and medical specialists. We're talking about fixed-wing pilots and military police and operations staff and educators and information officers and bomber pilots and chaplains.
We're talking about spending $36,300 per purge of our tax dollars to run people who want to serve our country out of the armed forces. What a waste of money. What a waste of talent. But, that's not unusual for this administration. Just go to the National Priorities Project website at www.nationalpriorities.org and click on the Cost of War interactive tool on the right side of the page. You'll see a ticker that as of this writing had us spending over $244 billion dollars on the war on Iraq.
And as that ticker increases second by second, the military continues to purge lesbian and gay personnel costing us even more. But the costs aren't just economic. By firing 244 medical personnel, the Pentagon has also imperiled the troops that are currently on the ground.
According to Dr. Aaron Belkin, Director of the Santa Barbara Center, the gay ban is hampering military readiness. "The consequences of shortfalls in medical specialists during wartime are serious," he said. "When the military lacks the medical personnel it needs on the frontlines, it compromises the well-being not only of its injured troops, but of the overextended specialists who have to work longer tours to replace those who have been discharged."
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that firing Arabic and Farsi interpreters isn't good for the war effort either.
Government sponsored discrimination against the LGBT community is a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars. Consider the amount of money Congress is spending trying to pass a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The printing, the staff time, the phone calls, the costs of keeping Congress open while some of this country’s top homophobes pontificate for the local news how red-blooded American families would be subverted if gays were allowed to marry.
In the early 90's, folks in Denver found out how costly discrimination was when Colorado's Amendment 2 passed. It prohibited a government entity from extending any type of legal protection to the LGBT community. Within seven months of its passing in 1992, more than 60 companies cancelled conventions or meetings in Colorado, approximately 20 U.S. municipalities severed ties with the state including New York City which divested any stock holdings it had with any Colorado companies. The Amendment is no more-the Supreme Court overturned it on the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
But when the County Commission in Hillsborough County, FL passed a resolution in 2005 to "abstain from acknowledging, promoting or participating in gay pride events" (they specifically used a lower case g and p to cover all things gay pride-related, not just one event), shockwaves of fear ran through the local business communities. Mary Scott, the general manager of the Marriott Waterside Resort in Tampa was quoted in the local business paper saying, "If this gets national attention, it could be disastrous."
Well, it did get national attention. But leave it to the LGBT community to come up with a truly creative way to give the Hillsborough homophobes the attention they deserved. Instead of a boycott, Equality Florida, the sunshine’s state's LGBT advocacy group, called for a Buycott. Essentially, LGBT owned or supportive companies were asked to sign up on the buycottfl.org website. The Buycott campaign then encouraged consumers in Hillsborough County and people coming to the Tampa/St. Peter area for tourism or convention purposes to patronize those 300 or so businesses that had taken a stand for diversity and against bigotry.
For those companies who lost business and for the folks in the military who have lost their jobs, one thing is crystal clear-discrimination doesn't pay.