Protesters Greet Army at HMS

Army recruiters faced about 20 protesters at Harvard Medical School yesterday as gay rights supporters staged a demonstration to decry the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Students wore placards around their necks that bore the names of gay and lesbian veterans who had been discharged under the policy. The students sat silently during an information session held by recruiters in Harvard’s Tosteson Medical Education Center.

The protest was led by a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Medical School students called the Kinsey 2 to 6’ers. They take their name from zoologist and sexuality researcher Alfred C. Kinsey’s six-point scale. Individuals who scored two or higher on Kinsey’s scale were deemed “more than incidentally homosexual,” according to the website of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.

Organizers of the demonstration said that only four of the students at the event were genuinely there to learn about the Army, and that about fifteen placard-wearing protesters attended the session.

A first-year Medical School student, Matthew C. Oertli, said the protest was designed “to put a face to the issue and to show that the discriminatory policy does affect actual people.”

The protest came as the Supreme Court considers a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a federal statute on campus military recruitment.

The statute, known as the Solomon Amendment and initially passed by Congress in 1994, allows the Pentagon to block federal funds to universities that restrict on-campus military recruitment.

A coalition of law schools sued Bush administration officials in 2003, saying that the Solomon Amendment violates schools’ free-speech and free-association rights. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case this past December and is expected to issue a decision in the coming months.

Oertli said the protesters wanted to “let the administration know that we understand what the Solomon Amendment is and that it complicates their position.”

But, Oertli added, “Keeping that in mind, we also wanted to ask the administration to publicly reaffirm its policy of non-discrimination and act accordingly.”

According to the Medical School’s website, “it is the strong and consistent policy” of the school “to ensure equal access to rights, privileges and opportunities without regard to...sexual orientation.”

A first-year Medical School student, Stanley R. Vance Jr., said the protesters felt that allowing military recruiters on campus was a direct violation of that policy.

According to Oertli and Vance, one student protester broke the silence to ask the military recruiters if they knew the number of service members who had been discharged under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.”

The recruiters did not know the statistic, according to Oertli and Vance.

According to Servicemembers Legal Defense Network’s website, over 10,000 people have been discharged from the armed forces due to sexual orientation since 1994.

—Staff writer Joyce Y. Zhang can be reached at jyzhang@fas.harvard.edu.