Military disservice.

• Author: Mohr, Richard D.

Gays should have started to worry when Bill Clinton, even before the inauguration, reneged on a campaign promise that he had made as a matter of principle. Clinton announced that he would maintain the Bush administration's ban preventing Haitian boat people from making claims that they were political refugees, thus denying them a legislated right afforded all other migrant populations. While campaigning, he had called the ban "cruel and illegal." The motivation for the special ban also seemed patently racist. But once Clinton was elected, this cruelty and illegality turned out to be a cruelty and illegality he could live with and even defend before the Supreme Court.

Within the first week of office, Clinton showed that such shaky morality would permeate his civil-rights policy. Both during the campaign and immediately following his election, he promised to lift by executive order the ban on gays in the military. More generally, during the campaign he said to gays, "I have a vision of America--and you're part of it." Here, as in his early statements on the Haitians, he outlined a moral position: Government may not place people in a degraded status because of what they are, as opposed to what they do, and it may not pursue its legitimate ends through means that violate this principle. But he started a moral retreat from such a principled stand as soon as resistance emerged from Congress, the military, and the people.

Clinton's first moral step backward--and strategic blunder to boot--was to suppose that this was an issue that could be properly addressed by consensus. To try to build a consensus, he turned first to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for advice. But he did so in a way that positioned them as free agents operating independently of the executive branch, rather than as subordinates in a military chain of command. Clinton conceded as much in his January 29 "compromise" speech, when he said the Joint Chiefs had "agreed" to the compromise, implying they had veto power over him.

And what is the value of consensus here anyway? Consensus-based decision making may be the best method for addressing matters of policy, but it is incompatible with matters of principle and of rights, for two reasons. First, to do something as a matter of principle--because it is right rather than popular--requires going against consensus. Second, lights are at heart minority claims against majorities, and so matters of rights can never legitimately be left to the tender mercies of majoritarian rule, let alone consensus. So Clinton was both conceptually confused and morally misguided when he tried to apply his business-as-usual political approach to a gay issue. In doing so, instead of advancing the...