Abstract
Four years ago, Captain Kenneth Karols and I submitted to the Department of Defense a draft report in which we recommended that research be undertaken, the results of which might facilitate the integration of gay men and lesbians into the armed forces. The recommendation followed from a historical and social psychological analysis, and also from the expectation that continuing pressures from civil rights advocates would influence the president, the Congress, or the Courts to rescind the discriminatory policy. On the basis of our conclusions that stereotypes, rather than empirically confirmed facts, provided the support for the resistance to changing the exclusionary policy, the recommended research would have focused on ways and means of deconstructing stereotypes (Sarbin & Karols, 1988). Our recommendation fell on deaf ears.
Prepared for the symposium Integrating Lesbians and Gay Men into the Military: 101st Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, August 23, 1993, Toronto, Canada. Discussions with Ralph Carney, Peter Lenrow, Mark Eithelberg, and John Kitsuse helped me in the formulation of the argument.
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and are not be construed as representing the position or policy of any government agency.
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Notes
- 1.
Research Psychologist, Defense Personnel Security Research Center, Monterey, CA.
- 2.
“Stereotype” as used in this paper carries the connotation of negative judgments of a class of people, often in the absence of any direct experience with members of the class. I am aware that the literature on the subject shows that stereotypes can be made up of positive attributions as well. Elsewhere I have made the claim that “social type” would serve a better descriptor for the purpose of this essay, and I am following the current common usage: “Stereotype” refers to a set of beliefs and attitudes, predominantly negative, a subset of the general category “social type.” It would be cumbersome to substitute “negatively valued social types” for “stereotypes.”
- 3.
Not all politicians avoid “sin” in phrasing their arguments. In discussions about expert testimony given to the House Armed Services Committee in May 1993, Rep. Robert Dornan (D-California) said, “all of the psychologists and psychiatrists in the world aren’t ever going to convince me that heterosexual sex (outside marriage) is not a sin, and I’m not going to cut a different standard” for homosexual sex (Monitor, American Psychological Association, July, 1993).
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Scheibe, K.E., Barrett, F.J. (2017). The Deconstruction of Stereotypes: Homosexuals and Military Policy. In: The Storied Nature of Human Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48790-8_11
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