By Dan Canon
The U.S. Armed Forces will stealthily evade the enemy to infiltrate a college campus on Feb. 25, thanks to the Wisdom of Solomon.
Sounds like an awful movie premise. It’s a good thing, then, that it’s not a movie but actually true. To explain, the “Armed Forces” are Judge Advocate General recruiters. The “infiltration” will happen right here at U of L, in a tiny room of the law school. Oh, and the “enemy”? The Brandeis School of Law’s non-discrimination policy.
The real intrigue is this Solomon character. Solomon is not, as you might imagine, a code name for a monocled, pipe-smoking five-star general sitting at the head of a long black table in a supercomputer-powered war room two miles beneath the surface of the earth. No, Solomon is former New York State Rep. Gerald Solomon.
In 1994, Rep. Solomon authored a bill that requires American law schools to allow JAG recruiters campus access … or else. Any school that refuses risks losing federal funding. The avowed purpose of the “Solomon Amendment” was to give the armed forces the opportunity extended to all the big law firms: to recruit the best and the brightest advocates. In return, Uncle Sam offers a pretty darn good career to almost anyone.
The problem with this is that nearly every law school in the country has a policy that doesn’t allow campus access to any employer who openly discriminates on the basis of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. Brandeis is no exception.
By contrast, while perhaps not asking and not telling, the military has had a policy of openly discriminating against gays and lesbians since World War I. This not only undermines the strategy to get the best and brightest to serve in an all-volunteer army, but also puts their policy in direct conflict with that of the university. The average law school, as you might have guessed, is a rule-oriented creature, and being forced to violate its own guidelines can be bad for its fragile ego.
Last year, the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights and the Society of American Law Teachers challenged the Solomon Amendment in the Third Circuit and won. While the court’s decision is laudable, the fundamental problem remains.
The military needs the best and the brightest. They need them to competently protect their fellow men and women in uniform, to competently rebuild the cities we destroy, and to ensure that justice is competently administered in military courts. We need the JAGs to have access to campus because the military needs good lawyers, regardless of their sexual orientation.
The solution to this stalemate is simple: the military must drop the outdated discrimination policy. It’s not just useless, it’s harmful to all parties involved. Gays and lesbians are no less capable of serving their country than straight folk. Meanwhile, the university should follow FAIR’s lead, and resist coercion by the federal government, in court if necessary.
Still a bit uncomfortable at the idea of gays in the military? Remember that the subject of women in combat was once taboo. At one time, blacks were denied the G.I. Bill, and a racially integrated platoon was a thing unheard of. These facts now seem as archaic as horse cavalry and muzzle-loading rifles.
The point is that the military can change its policies for the better, and has done so in the past. Our resources are stretched too thin to fret about who’s kissing who. While Solomon’s intentions may seem noble, there’s no sense throwing out the baby with the bathwater when he can be put to good use.
Dan Canon is a first-year law student at Brandeis School of Law and a columnist for The Cardinal. E-mail him at: dcanon@louisvillecardinal.com
