West Point Thesis
Challenges Gay Policy
By AP from the
NYTimes on the Web, August 8, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Alexander Raggio
says he was 16 when he learned one of his relatives was gay -- and watching that
person's struggle gave him a grim introduction to discrimination against gays.
He carried those feelings into West Point, and in his senior thesis argued that
the military's policy banning gays is not only wrong, but harmful to the Army.
The Pentagon may not agree, but the U.S. Military Academy gave him an award for
the paper.
''I love the Army and I think that this is hurting the Army,'' said Raggio, 24,
in an interview this week from his new military post at Fort Riley, Kan.
''I see it as my obligation to say 'I don't agree with what you're doing.'
I'm not being insubordinate -- I just think we're making a mistake here.''
He said it was the first time he had spoken publicly about the paper or the
award, which he received last year when he graduated from West Point in New
York.
While the topic was controversial, and the argument contrary to the military's
'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy, Raggio was presented the Brig. Gen. Carroll E.
Adams Award for the best senior thesis in the art, philosophy and literature
major in the academy's English department.
''It won independent of the subject matter and content,'' said his thesis
adviser Richard Schoonhoven, a philosophy professor at West Point. ''It
was a closely argued piece of philosophical prose. He tackled a
substantive issue, took a stand and didn't back down from the controversy.
He presented a good case.''
Initially Raggio worried about a backlash from his paper, saying people told
him, ''There's a possibility this will come back to haunt you, that people will
use it against you.'' But in the end, he said he felt obligated to say
what he thought.
''The Army often talks of doing the harder right rather than the easier wrong,
and now it is time to put the policy where the propaganda is,'' he wrote in his
24-page thesis. ''Allowing the open service of gays in the military is the
right thing to do, no matter how difficult a transition it may be.''
Under the Pentagon's policy, the military is prohibited from inquiring about the
sex lives of service members, but those who openly acknowledge being gay must be
discharged. There were 726 military members discharged under the policy
during the year that ended last Sept. 30.
''I have a problem where you have a military that says you can't discriminate
based on race; in all but very minimal ways you can't discriminate based on
gender, and you can't discriminate based on religion or lack of religion.
The only people not getting a fair shake were homosexuals,'' said Raggio, who is
from Muncie, Ind., and describes himself as ''about the straightest guy you can
imagine.''
He says he knew by the time he was in seventh grade that he wanted to go to West
Point and become a career Army officer. Now a 2nd lieutenant, leading a
platoon in the 97th Military Police Battalion, he talks eagerly of going to
Iraq, possibly next year.
He plans to spend at least 20 years in the service, and he said he believes the
Army he loves is capable of integrating openly gay soldiers, much as it brought
in minorities and women.
In his paper Raggio acknowledged that changing the policy may create tension or
put openly gay soldiers at risk of violence.
But he argued that soldiers who make life and death decisions in Iraq and handle
volatile situations with insurgents and prisoners are capable of dealing with a
gay soldier in their battalion.
Advocates of gays in the military said they were encouraged that Raggio's paper
was lauded by the school.
''I think that this award symbolizes a shift in military culture,'' said Aaron
Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the
Military, a think tank at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
''Raggio was brave enough to write about it in the first place, but the fact
that West Point would give him an award for challenging the gay ban is a
powerful indication of how far the military has come culturally.''
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