Real Politikin’: The General in the Pottery Store

In 1998, as part of National Job Shadow Day, a closeted high
school gay boy by the name of Jamaal was chosen to hold a phone conversation
with one of his biggest heroes, Colin Powell.  Humbled at the chance to speak with him, Jamaal listened to the four-star General as he spoke of how service to
others was in direct line with other great American values such as equality and
justice—they were in practice interconnected.  This was, after all the very experience of Powell’s life and
career.  That discussion helped
spur the teen to not only complete over 1000 hours of community service during
his senior year of high school but also to spend most of his college and adult
career promoting educational opportunity and social justice.

You can then imagine how Jamaal felt eleven years later when
during an interview he heard his hero say that he was open to ending the ban on
gays serving in the military—known as Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell—only if the “quality of force” would not be negatively
affected.  Jamaal would also hear
the General add in a later interview that he thought the policy, which, in his
role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he helped create in 1993, was
“right at the time.”

To the say the least, Jamaal—who was then not so closeted
and way past high school days—was more than a little taken aback.  Was this not the same black man Jamaal
had personally witnessed stand up before the entire 2000 Republican National
Conference and chide that Party for its often bigoted and xenophobic attacks
against affirmative action and immigration?  Was he not the same statesman who had openly criticized the
President he served for that President’s embrace of detainee torture?  Why, after a life lived in the spirit
of the highest of American traditions—service, equality and justice—had he
chosen the question of gays and lesbians openly serving in the military as the
moment when he would abandon those traditions?  Why didn’t the General seem to understand that his very own
“if-then” proposition—if troop morale
doesn’t suffer then gays can
honorably serve their country—was the same moral relativism that once justified
racial and gender discrimination in the military?

One of the most lauded moments of Powell’s career comes from
advice he gave President Bush before the 2003 invasion of Iraq: once you break
it, you own it.   With these
words, later dubbed the “pottery store rule,” the General was speaking of the responsibility
the Bush administration owed to the American and Iraqi peoples.  In effect, he was saying that their
actions had to be understood in the context of what it means to be in the service
of others. 

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1990s, Colin
Powell’s service to this nation included his decision to support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  He is thus responsible to each and
every one of the over 13,000 men and women in the Armed Forces who were dismissed
as a result of this policy.  So we
must ask the General, how is the exclusion of gays and lesbians in-line with
the American ideal of equality before the law, which is the cornerstone of
justice?  How has their
absence—more than the number of soldiers lost in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
combined—not adversely affected both the quality of our Armed Forces and
perhaps more importantly the ideal that service to others is a right and
responsibility we all share? 

Yes, Colin Powell was not and is not the lone voice in
support of banning gays and lesbians from serving openly in the Armed
Forces.  The implementation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was approved by
Democrats and Republicans alike, in Congress and in the White House.  Any and all who did not vote against
its passage are complicit in this institutionalized abandonment of American
values.  But when the very same
institution that the General once led—the Joint Chiefs of Staff—produces a
2010 legal memo that states “now is not the time” to repeal of the law (even
though the current Commander-in-Chief is of the different opinion), then it
becomes even more imperative that the General realize his role in creating this
broken policy.  If we are to
believe his own words, his own actions over the course of what has been a life
lived in the best traditions of this nation, should not Powell be the most
forceful voice in the effort to repeal this unequal and unjust law that is of
service to none?   

It has been quite some time since the General and I first
spoke and I still believe that service to others is inextricably linked to our
understandings of equality and justice. 
I remain humbled that this belief was in part installed by Colin Powell
and I am also hopeful that when the time comes, the General’s views on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will truly be in
service to our great nation. 

From 1998-99,
Jamaal Young served as a co-chair of South Carolina Promise, an educational
organization affiliated with America’s Promise, an educational alliance created
by Colin Powell in 1997, where Mr. Young also worked in 2003.