Can the U.S. armed forces really afford to keep acquiescing to prejudice and hypocrisy?

There’s a war going on, and recruiters have enough of a challenge meeting their quotas, especially in critical skill areas. This is no time to be pushing distinguished service members out the door just because they’re homosexual.

The reason for the practice is no mystery. Those who can rationalize homophobia in the name of shower-room anxiety say you have to cleanse the military of gays and lesbians for the sake of morale.

Even if you buy that, however, the infamous don’t-ask-don’t-tell legacy of the Clinton administration doesn’t get it done. It just rewards dishonesty. (Maybe there should be a medal for meritorious obfuscation in time of culture war.)

Are there gays and lesbians in the military (as there are in the classroom, the workplace, the municipal swimming pool, the golf club locker room)? Of course there are. But there is one fewer in the Air Force since Maj. Margaret H. Witt of Spokane was sent packing.

Witt is not leaving without a fight. She is going to court to protect the proud, 19-year career that the Air Force wants to end after finding out she is a lesbian. She’s also a nurse, by the way – one who was commended for saving a Defense Department employee’s life, one who spent nine years on active duty and one who has been a reservist since 1995.

Similarities with Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer’s celebrated case are inescapable.

Cammermeyer, a decorated Vietnam veteran and high-ranking Washington National Guard nurse, was going through a security clearance process in 1989 when she stated she is a lesbian. Against the wishes of her Guard superiors, the Army demanded that she be kicked out.

Cammermeyer went to court to challenge the military’s ban on homosexuals, and she won. Did that convince the Pentagon what a waste it is to sacrifice valuable personnel on the altar of petty prejudice? No, it just led to don’t-ask-don’t-tell.

Last year, a federal study estimated that it has cost taxpayers at least $190 million over the past decade to recruit and train replacements for discharged gays and lesbians. Did that change the Pentagon’s mind? Ask Maj. Witt.

In the middle of the 20th century, the nation got past a similar moral blind spot. Racial segregation came to an end in the U.S. military and in professional sports – compelled not by courts but by courage. Harry Truman, Branch Rickey and other visionaries showed us the way.

America is a great nation, founded on the noblest of aspirations. But the thing about aspirations is they keep asking us to do more, to run a little faster, push a little harder to catch up to an ideal as elusive as universal justice.

Looking back 50 or 60 years, we take pride today in the parents and grandparents who stood on the side of principle and, if they didn’t personally help knock down inappropriate social barriers, they at least concurred in the cause. And we scratch our heads at the narrow-mindedness that kept it from happening sooner.

Support our troops? Who supports Maj. Margaret Witt in her desire to serve her country as admirably in the future as she has in the past?

Some enlightened day, many years from now, Americans will look back with regret and disbelief on a time in history when bigotry still held our higher values hostage. By then, they will be able to point to a generation that dug in its heels and said, “No more!”

Let this be that generation.