The Pentagon is pushing for service members who received a "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT) survey to share their opinions on the possible termination of DADT.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated that he also wants homosexual military members to participate. "I strongly encourage gays and lesbians who are in the military to fill out [the] forms."
According to the Pentagon, the information gathering process was set up to protect the privacy of gay and lesbian respondents via third party confidentiality.
Initially, 200,000 military men and women were to be surveyed, but Gates called for that number to be doubled, bringing the total to 400,000.
Gates asked for the larger sampling in order to get a more accurate assessment of the participants views bringing the percent of polled personnel from 8.5% to about 17.5% of the entire U.S. military.
President Obama's recent Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan recently described DADT in a very negative light, calling it "a profound wrong — a moral injustice of the first order.”
Obama himself has also shown that he is against the continuation of DADT. When reading under the category of Civil Rights issues on Whitehouse.gov one can find the following statement:
"[Obama] supports repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in a sensible way that strengthens our armed forces and our national security."
Secretary Gates recent statements on the issue have conveyed that there is not a sense of urgency in regard to the overturning of DADT. The secretary has commented that changes would not take place unless the president and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can guarantee that the Department of Defense (DoD) is prepared to shift in the new direction.
Specifically, Gates said that there would be no change unless the DoD was "ready to make the change without hurting unit cohesion, military readiness, military effectiveness and recruiting and retention."
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