A Benefits Battle Looms

[William769]

As the saying goes, the military recruits soldiers, but it retains families.

And, it goes without saying, gay service members have families of their own.

How they will be treated in the incipient post-“don’t ask, don’t tell” era is an open question, though the current answer is, quite simply, unequally. The subject was a pressing one for many attendees at the recent inaugural OutServe Armed Forces Leadership Summit, organized by a group that started as a small underground network of gay active duty service members and now reports 4,500 members in 45 chapters worldwide, including two in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s also an issue seized upon by several Republican presidential hopefuls, however, as well as a handful of GOP House members spurred on by social conservative organizations determined to undermine open service. On Friday, as OutServe conference participants — active duty and retired, out on the job or closeted at work — arrived in Las Vegas to discuss topics from the stress of deployment to navigating available family benefits, one fervent anti-repeal congressman, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, alleged that attempts at bringing parity to gay service members is part of a devious strategy by the “homosexual lobby,” one that “isn’t simply pressing to have equal status in the military with people that are heterosexual.”

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2011/10/18/A_Benefits_Battle_Looms/