Outside the Beltway

Military Advertises on Gay Website

James Joyner · Thursday, October 18, 2007 · 3 comments

The U.S. military inadvertently placed thousands of job ads on a gay website.

The Army, Navy and Air Force unwittingly advertised for recruits on a website for gays, who are barred from military service if they are open about their sexual orientation.

When informed Tuesday by USA TODAY that they were advertising on GLEE.com, a networking website for gay professionals, recruiters expressed surprise and said they would remove the job listings. “This is the first I’ve heard about it,” said Maj. Michael Baptista, advertising branch chief for the Army National Guard, which will spend $6.5 million on Internet recruiting this year. “We didn’t knowingly advertise on that particular website,” which he said does not “meet the moral standards” of the military.

Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a Navy recruiting spokesman, said his service ordered more than 8,000 ads taken off GLEE, which stands for Gay, Lesbian & Everyone Else. By late Wednesday, most were gone.

[…]

Most of the military jobs posted were hard-to-fill positions requiring advanced training, although some ads sought to fill core combat slots at a time when the Iraq war has challenged recruiters to meet goals. They included:

•Thousands of Navy openings for doctors, dentists, intelligence analysts, Arabic translators and others.

•Hundreds of Air Force jobs for optometrists, social workers, physician’s assistants and nurses.

•Nearly 1,000 Army National Guard and active Army positions, including infantry and artillery.

The ads were placed through GLEE’s parent company, New York-based Community Connect, as part of an alliance with jobs-listing giant Monster.com. Betty Huang of Community Connect says the military services, through private ad agencies, bought Monster’s “diversity and inclusion” package, which includes posts on her company’s niche websites for Asian-Americans, blacks, Latinos and gays. Kathleen Donald, who handles the Navy’s account at Campbell-Ewald, said Monster never informed her ad agency that GLEE had been added to the package when the site launched in March. “It was an internal goodwill effort on their part to give added value” at no extra cost, she said.

Theoretically, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” allows gays to join the military so long as they don’t talk about or otherwise demonstrate that they engage in, attempt to engage in, haves a propensity to engage in, or intends to engage in homosexual acts. Presumably, too the “Everyone Else” in GLEE would be eligible, too.

Further, as best I can tell from the home page, GLEE.com doesn’t violate “the moral standards” of the military. The express intent of the law is to ensure unit cohesion, morale, and discipline; the military has no official position on the morality of homosexual conduct.

If that remains the case, it’s much more difficult to justify a ban on homosexual doctors, dentists, translators, and the like than one for infantrymen. While all of these people live in close quarters, they’re rather seldom called upon to occupy a foxhole.