The Joint Chiefs of Staff have concluded that openly gay and lesbian troops are unacceptable, detrimental and disruptive.

Unacceptable? How about the practice of sending troops to Iraq without proper armor to protect them when explosive devices go off in their faces?

Detrimental? How about the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder who have to fight and/or wait for proper treatment? Or receive no treatment at all?

Disruptive? How about being a young soldier with a young family sent back for a fourth tour in Iraq because the military can’t recruit fast enough to replace the injured and dying soldiers there?

In the meantime, the military is casting away thousands of qualified, dedicated troops and officers each year because they are gay or lesbian. What crazy times we dwell in.

Margaret Witt knows this firsthand. Three years ago, the major in the Air Force was forced out after her superiors discovered she was living in a committed, lesbian relationship. Witt – a Spokane School District physical therapist – is fighting back. In Seattle on Monday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals listened to her case.

There’s not much optimism that Witt will prevail. But kudos to her for fighting the good fight. She will join the many courageous women and men in history who force a culture to look at its hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy in the military? You bet. It condemns gay and lesbian sex while heterosexual sex among its troops often remains violent and ugly. According to a recent Christian Science Monitor article: “A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. In (another) study, conducted in 1992-93 with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90 percent said they had been sexually harassed in the military, which means anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.”

Things haven’t improved much in the Iraq war. The Pentagon admitted to the Washington Post that there have been more than 500 sexual assaults involving U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most experts believe most sexual assaults remain unreported.

Lawyers representing the government in the Witt case believe they stand on solid legal ground. For more than 25 years, they say, appeals courts have upheld policy prohibiting “homosexual acts by military personnel.” Solid legal ground is not always the correct moral ground. In the famous 1857 Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that African-Americans could never be citizens.

The culture all around the military is changing to more readily accept that sexual orientation does not define a person. Can the person do a job with diligence, commitment and integrity? That’s all that should matter in any workplace.

When military people as gifted and needed as Witt are discarded, it should be unacceptable, because it is detrimental to the military – and the rest of us dependent upon it for protection.