Gay veterans sue Defense Department over military discharges
A group of LGBTQ veterans who were dismissed from the U.S. military because of their sexuality are suing the Department of Defense for denying them honorable discharges and listing their sexual orientations on their service records.
In a class action lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the plaintiffs are asking for the department to grant them honorable discharges so they can access all veteran benefits, including health care, college tuition assistance and loan programs.
They are also requesting that language be removed from their discharge documents that notes their sexualities, arguing that the documents — which the plaintiffs say must be provided to access some veterans’ benefits — violate their privacy.
“Our government and leaders have long acknowledged that the military’s discrimination against LGBTQ+ service members — and what was done to me — was wrong,” one of the named plaintiffs, U.S. Army veteran Steven Egland, said in a statement. “The time has come to rectify it by correcting our records. All of those who served deserve to have documents that reflect the honor in our service.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Defense declined to comment on the pending litigation.
Some of the plaintiffs were dismissed under the military's 1993 “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which permitted gays and lesbians to serve as long as they remained closeted, while others were discharged due to previous laws that barred gays and lesbians from military service, according to a statement from the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
More than 13,000 service members were discharged from the U.S. military for violating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) police, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, an LGBTQ research organization.
Since the policy’s repeal, advocates for LGBTQ veterans have asked the U.S. government to automatically adjust the discharge status of former service members and issue an apology.
In 2017, the Trump administration placed a ban on transgender Americans from openly serving and enlisting in the military, which the Biden administration lifted in 2021.
Democratic members of the House and the Senate introduced separate measures in 2021, urging the government to apologize for the mistreatment of LGBTQ service members.
Tuesday’s lawsuit notes that there is an existing application process by which veterans can request changes to the status of their discharge, but the suit argues the process is “complicated and intimidating.”
“The currently available discharge upgrade process is burdensome, opaque, expensive, and, for many veterans, virtually inaccessible,” a statement from the plaintiffs’ lawyers reads. “The process not only takes months or years, but also requires veterans to prove that an error or injustice warrants updating their discharge papers to the very entity that caused the error or injustice, despite the Government’s own acknowledgement that DADT was discriminatory.”
Without changes from the Department of Defense, the suit argues, “the Government’s ongoing discrimination” against LGBTQ veterans will continue.
“Because of the circumstances and language of my discharge, which served as a painful reminder of the trauma I experienced, I was never able to proudly say that I served my country,” Egland said in his statement
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
