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.