A Dec. 3 WorldNetDaily article by Brian Fitzpatrick highlighted a claim by Sen. John McCain that repealing the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy “could drive massive numbers of troops out of the service,” focusing on his assertion that a Pentagon survey finding that 12.6 percent of those polled would think about leaving the military earlier than planned translated to 264,000 troops leaving the military.
Fitzpatrick then piled on by citing Bob Maginnis, “military analyst” for the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, who said, “If you add in the number who said they ‘might’ leave, you get 23.7 percent. That would be 528,000, when you count both active duty and reserves.”
What Fitzpatrick doesn’t bother to report is that the speculation of McCain and Maginnis runs counter to the actual experiences of other countries that have implemented a similar policy. As Media Matters detailed, a 2003 article in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly found that “[n]ot a single one of the 104 experts interviewed believed that the Australian, Canadian, Israeli, or British decisions to lift their gay bans … led to increased difficulties in recruiting or retention.”
You’d think that would be relevant to include in such an article. Fitzpatrick didn’t. In fact, he quotes no DADT critics in his article.