More than 800 former U.S. service members who were kicked out of the military for being gay will automatically have their discharge status upgraded, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.
A year after announcing it would proactively review the service records of veterans booted from the military because of the now-defunct "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the Pentagon said nearly 97%, or about 823 of 851 cases it reviewed, resulted in an upgraded discharge.
"Under President Biden's leadership, the Department of Defense has taken extraordinary steps to redress the harms done by 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and other policies on these former service members," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement Tuesday announcing the results of the review. "We will continue to honor the service and the sacrifice of all our troops -- including the brave Americans who raised their hands to serve but were turned away because of whom they love."
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"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was implemented during the Clinton administration with the intention of being a compromise between having a full ban on gay service members and allowing gay people to serve openly. But in practice, the policy was effectively a ban on gay, lesbian and bisexual service members that resulted in nearly 14,000 discharges.
The policy was repealed in 2011, but veterans who were kicked out of the military because of it have described lasting harm more than a decade later.
One of the main issues years later is that many of the troops kicked out under the policy were given less-than-honorable discharges. That means those former service members lost access to some Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, including home loans, tuition assistance and health care.
While those veterans could apply to upgrade their discharge status, veterans and advocates have criticized that process as cumbersome and traumatizing. The Pentagon's proactive review was launched last year in response to that criticism.
The upgraded discharges will unlock VA benefits for hundreds of veterans for the first time. The Pentagon is directly contacting those who were approved for an upgrade with information on how to obtain their updated paperwork, the department said Tuesday.
While Pentagon officials are touting that 96% of those booted under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" now have honorable discharges, there are still thousands of service members with less-than-honorable discharges who were kicked out under previous bans on gay military service.
Last year, a group of veterans sued the Pentagon to make the department automatically upgrade discharges from both "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and earlier bans. The Pentagon sought to have the case dismissed after it announced the proactive review of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" discharges, but a federal judge in June ruled that the case should proceed.
Those who sued "suffer new injuries attributable to [the Pentagon] each time they must present their paperwork disclosing their sexual orientation to obtain benefits or are unable to access benefits that would have been available to them had they not been discharged under defendants' past unconstitutional policies and forced to bear the burden of seeking correction of that paperwork from defendants," Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in the ruling.
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