Elena Kagan barred military recruiters from Harvard’s campus as a protest against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” but she didn’t find that it compromised her principles to go work for the man who created the “Don’t Ask/Don’t tell” policy?
She has said she acted because the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which bars openly gay men and women from serving, was a violation of the university’s anti-discrimination rules. And that as an alternative, she encouraged a campus veterans group to facilitate the Pentagon’s recruitment of students.
Sessions disputed Kagan’s version of events, saying that for one recruiting season “you gave them (the Pentagon) the runaround. … You’ve continued to persist with this view that somehow there was a loophole in the statute that Harvard didn’t have to comply with.”
Kagan is clearly obfuscating on this issue because she knows that her view on this is wildly unpopular. And at the heart of it lies a glaring inconsistency.
Clinton introduced Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell in 1993 which Kagan protested by keeping recruiters out of Harvard yet Kagan took the job as Clinton’s Associate White House Counsel to the President in 1995. So either Kagan shuttled her principles for the sake of career enhancement or Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell had nothing to do with Kagan keeping military recruiters off campus in the first place.
Kagan says she respects and esteems the military but what other reason could there have been other than an animosity towards the military?
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