Servicemembers Legal Defense Network released a legal guide on July 28th to help gay military members, veterans and their families deal with a post-DADT world after 9/20/11 when the full repeal is effective, 60 days after President Obama's repeal certification.
The 53-page PDF file may be downloaded from SLDN's website here.
However, a post-DADT world might be shortlived should Michele Bachmann or some other GOP candidate replace Barrack Obama and decide to make good on the promise to restore DADT that Bachmann made during the GOP's presidential candidate debate last week in Iowa.
The New York Times noted the following today:
...The law repealing the ban that President Obama signed last December did not expressly order the Pentagon to allow openly gay or lesbian troops in the armed forces. Congress merely laid out a process under which the ban could be lifted.
...Because Congress did not require the military to allow open service, a new president could order his or her new secretary of defense to issue new regulations that effectively reinstate the ban, said Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which advocates for gay and lesbian troops.
Mr. Sarvis [of SLDN] said that if a Republican president were to take that path, it would essentially return the military to the pre-don’t ask era, when gays were banned under regulation. In those years, which date back at least to World War II, he said, there were no federal statutes expressly prohibiting openly gay people from serving. It wasn’t until President Clinton pushed to reverse those regulations that Congress enacted don’t ask, don’t tell in the 1990s, statutorily prohibiting open service.
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