ABSTRACT
Other world military forces lifted their bans on openly gay service members in the early 1990s, around the time that then-US President William J. Clinton signed a policy named “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue.” The policy was a “satisficing” effort to alleviate conflict between two constituencies – those who wanted to retain the “gay ban” and those who wanted to remove it. The law later came to be known simply as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” or DADT. However well-intentioned the policy’s genesis may have been, DADT suffered the fate of many resolutions reached through “satisficing” – holding in the short-term but succumbing when the original (unresolved) conflict inevitably re-erupts.
