To the Editor:
In their decision to allow the Reserve Officers' Training Corps to continue to exist at Dartmouth, the Trustees have leant their support not only to the Pentagon's hateful policy of discrimination against lesbians, gays and bisexuals, but to the basic philosophical tenet on which any culture of violence is based - the belief that human beings are not unique individuals of infinite intrinsic worth, but rather a collection of attributes each of which can be used to identify, categorize, and evaluate people, providing a rationale for violence against a person, people or class.
In the case of the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, openly lesbian, gay and bisexual women and men are evaluated solely on the basis of their sexuality. They are given a choice between two forms of psycholgical violence - they are forced to either suppress and deny their identitiy or to be excluded from the military. Both forms of psychological violence send the clear message that anyone who isn't heterosexual is inferior, which in turn provides a rationale for the physical violence of suicide and gay-bashing. This regardless of the fact that lesbians, gays and bisexuals are just as fundamentally human as heterosexuals.
But this should come as no surprise, because this kind of logic is the logic on which the operation and existance of the military is based. The governement's decision to wage war and the soldier's decision to follow the orders of his government is based on the philosophy that other human beings deserve to die because of their nationality or their political allegiances - attributes just as arbitrary as a person's sexuality. A conscripted Serb soldier or an Iraqi civillian is just as human as an American. But yet they are defined as the enemy and thus their murder is considered justifiable - and even commendable as the government's subsidies for the education of those who are willing to kill in its name demostrate.
ROTC serves to foster the ideology that the "other" is inferior and that violence against those who are inferior is justifiable. In sanctioning ROTC, the Trustees have leant their support to this ideology. All of us, and especially those of us who aren't directly affected by this policy, have a responsibilty to speak out against the Trustee's decision. Our silence on this issue can only represent complicity in the violence against our lesbian, gay and bisexual sisters and brothers and complicity in the perpetuation of war. Martin Luther King once wrote "We must ask ourselves not what will happen to us if we speak out, but what will happen to them if we don't." Now is the time for all of us to live by his words and take a stand against violence.
SEAN DONAHUE '96
