Queer Brinkmanship: Citizenship in a Time of War

Abstract

In 1994, Congress passed a law commonly known as the Solomon Amendment, threatening universities and law schools with loss of federal funding if they deny or effectively prevent military recruiters from accessing campuses and directory information about students. It was the opening salvo in what has become a voluble expressive battle between the military and law schools. This fall, under cover of war, the Department of Defense (DoD) attempted to bring a decisive end to the conflict. Helping themselves to millions of dollars of ammunition from the coffers of their fellow agencies—with ambiguous authority at best—the military successfully forced Judge Advocate General (JAG) recruiters onto campuses around the country, upending carefully wrought compromises in favor of a show of force. This Comment takes this queer brinksmanship as its subject. There are numerous ways to criticize both the Solomon Amendment and the recent DoD enforcement campaign. It appears, for example, that the DoD is operating in violation of its own regulations, and relying upon statutory interpretations that raise serious constitutional questions under the Spending Clause. There are also potential First Amendment problems with the Solomon Amendment, particularly because of the special zone of speech protection that universities enjoy. From a pragmatic point of view, Solomon and the recent escalation look like colossal cognitive error. By refusing to hire openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals, and by adopting tactics that generate protests and ethical dilemmas for potential recruits, the military sharply undermines its own recruiting efforts. This Comment contends, however, that we cannot measure Solomon’s success or failure against its pragmatic impact on military recruiting, because Solomon is not and has never been about effective military recruiting. Rather, Solomon and its recent enforcement are maneuvers in an expressive battle, fought over the role that homosexuals play in a community, the purpose of the modern university, and the meaning of good citizenship. But if Solomon is a symbolic conflict, who is winning? This Comment suggests a surprising possibility: The military may be serving the cause of homosexuals by calling attention to its discriminatory policies in their most transparently homophobic context (the JAG Corps). The military also may have done universities a favor by returning them to their heritage of dissent: Forced to relinquish the accommodations upon which they relied to manage the conflict, universities and law schools now have little choice but simply to confront it. Finally, I suggest that those of us dedicated to nondiscrimination principles that include sexual orientation should welcome this opportunity for engagement—but also think seriously about what it would mean to win, and what we are willing to risk to do so.