Solomon’s Other Song

At the height of the Vietnam War, Arlo Guthrie wrote a song about littering. The song, “Alice’s Restaurant,” tells the story of a young man who is called before the draft board only to discover that an arrest for littering a few years back makes him ineligible to serve in the Vietnam War, a war he detests. The narrator, asked if he’s rehabilitated himself after his crime, loses his cool. “You got a lot a damn gall,” he explodes, “to ask me…if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses, and villages after bein’ a litterbug.”

As the debate over the Solomon Amendment plays out in the Supreme Court, I often find myself thinking about Arlo. After all, beyond the other questions that surround the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy there is a fundamental absurdity: the American military of 2005 telling gays and lesbians they’re not moral enough to join up.

The debate over the Solomon Amendment on this campus has largely become a proxy war between those who love the military and those who don’t. Just like “Alice’s Restaurant” isn’t really about littering, the Solomon debate isn’t really about gay people. That doesn’t mean gays and lesbians shouldn’t be allowed to enlist. They should. But the debate on this campus has been about far more than gay rights. It has been about the very nature of the military and our relationship to it as Harvard students.

From what I’ve heard, the pro-Solomon side seems to go something like this: liberals may make some good arguments about problems with the military, but the way to deal with these problems is not to keep Ivy Leaguers out of the armed forces. If liberals want to see a more liberal military, they should enlist. The Harvard Law School (HLS) policy—and Harvard’s bias against military service—ensure that the armed forces retains a conservative and homophobic culture. Besides, even if the military isn’t always right, America still needs a fighting force. We can debate our foreign policy, but while the debate is happening, American institutions should cooperate with the American military.

This argument is, to use a technical term, a load of crap. First, the last place to go if you want to change the military is into the military. In 1948, Harry Truman ended more than 100 years of military culture by integrating the Armed Forces. No comparable change to military culture has ever been achieved from the inside, because the U.S. military was set up to be controlled by civilians. Only Congress can change “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Only civilian leaders can decide who the military fights and when. Nobody polls recruits before major policy decisions are made. If you want to fight wars, join the military; if you want to end war, go into politics.

The question of military exceptionalism deserves more thought. Unlike most corporate law firms, the military must exist. But Congress shouldn’t force schools to accept a discriminatory institution just because the institution is necessary. HLS’s policy isn’t a statement about whether the military should exist; it’s a statement about discrimination. If the Catholic Church wanted to hire a group of straight Catholics to serve the poor, they couldn’t do it at HLS. It’s not that HLS doesn’t think the Catholic Church should help the poor. HLS just doesn’t want to reconsider its policies every time a group can claim they are doing really valuable work.

The debate over the military becomes most difficult when it veers into the dangerous and muddy waters of class. As most everybody knows, the people who fight America’s wars tend to come from America’s most disadvantaged groups. This gives a populist tinge to a lot of militarist rhetoric. The troops whose mission I undermine every time I take the silver spoon out of my mouth long enough to speak are the same huddled masses my fellow liberals and I claim to be so concerned about when the subject is fiscal policy. More importantly, my decision—and the decision of other Harvard liberals—not to join the military ensures that soldiers will continue to be drawn largely from the bottom income and education brackets.

It would be ridiculous to join a military you don’t agree with because you think it needs more rich people. The poor are overrepresented among prison inmates, but you don’t hear anybody suggesting that every liberal grab a gun and off a cop. On the other hand, I understand the argument that liberals should temper their criticism of the military because of the difficult circumstances and decisions that lead so many soldiers to military service. Liberals should be sensitive to the difficulties faced by many soldiers. But the question of militarism is too important for liberals to pull their punches out of a misplaced sense of class guilt.

As the Supreme Court prepares to reject HLS’s right to enforce its anti-discrimination policies, it is worth recognizing the larger issues at stake in this debate. Gay rights are far more important than the protection of litterbugs, but, at times ,even that principle is not the central question in the debate over the Solomon Amendment. We must determine how we as Harvard students should view the military. The question isn’t whether gays and lesbians at Harvard are moral enough for the military; it’s whether the military is moral enough for Harvard.



Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.