More on the DADT Report

Via Andrew Sullivan:

It's coming down to the wire here folks! The Washington Post has announced that the full report is expected to be presented at 2:30 pm today. 54 minutes my time...

The numbers are in:

70 percent of service members believe it would have little or no effect on their units, according to sources briefed on the report's findings.

According to a survey sent to 400,000 service members, 69 percent of those responding reported that they had served with someone in their unit who they believed to be gay or lesbian. Of those who did, 92 percent stated that their unit's ability to work together was very good, good, or neither good nor poor, according to the sources.

Combat units reported similar responses, with 89 percent of Army combat units and 84 percent of Marine combat units saying they had good or neutral experiences working with gays and lesbians.

For me, this represents a refutation of the idea that our men and women in the military are somehow too immature to work as professionals with gays or lesbians. The polling results from the combat units, most tellingly marines...the only branch that has expressed any real opposition to repeal of the ban...is particularly telling.

Opponents of repeal have consistently and insultingly painted the members of our armed services as knuckledragging homophobes that would wilt in panic and disarray were they to ever discover a homosexual in their midst.

Guess what? They're professionals. Most of them believe that they've been serving with gays all along. And most of them believe it had no effect on the performance of their units, combat or otherwise.

That said, of course opposition to actual repeal of the law does exist particularly amongst the Marine Corp (30% overall were opposed to repeal of the law with 40-60% of Marines against). But still, the numbers are in: Overwhelmingly, our men and women in the military just don't care who a member of their unit is sleeping with. They care if they can fight.