“Mission Possible: The Story of Repealing Don’t Ask
Don’t Tell”, is a complete narrative, authored and self-published by C.
Dixon Osburn, an attorney who helped create SLDN
Servicemembers Legal Defense Network shortly after president
Bill Clinton tried to implement “don’t ask don’t tell don’t pursue” in 1993.
The other cofounder was Michelle Benecke,
otherwise on a track to have the Army pay for her law school.
The book is largely a detailed narrative in the style
of Randy Shilts (“Conduct Unbecoming”, 1993), covering the political wranglings
as well as specious reinterpretation by field commanders to do what they wanted
according to existing patriarchal personal values. Osburn
uses his own name as his brand or trademark, an idea that I expect to invoke next
year.
So
I’d like to cover the intersection with my own books and life.
On Dev 10 2010 I attended the event at the Capitol
where Lieberman’s separate repeal, outside NDAA, and as I arrived
I received a call about my mother’s sudden fatal turn. I don’t recall that the filibuster could have
stopped its passage in the following lame duck days.
The heart of the antigay argument was summarized as
“unit cohesion” (legacy HBO film) or, as Nunn put it, soldiers have no
privacy. I encountered the same thing in
1961 on the WM dorm. Young men might
fear being scoped and losing their own edge on joining a patriarchal society as
future dads. Osburn
paints society post Stonewall and as dealing with HIV as more hostile than what
I experienced, where I could easily play double life — which the Internet would
destroy. A big concern is the effect on
civilians, who had already dealt with conscription. I have my own strange history. The draft physicals had stopped asking in
1966. Over time, young adults signaled that they were not as easily distracted
as feared, and arguments grew more identarian, even intersectional.
Osburn
notes tension between SLDN and HRC on policy priorities and even with Belkin’s
Palm Center, which I visited in 2002.
This issue is separate from Trump’s transgender ban.
ISBN 978-7374824-1-3 paper ebook 43
chapters.