-RSS Feeds
The Boiled Frog Blog
Boil a frog slowly and it fails to appreciate its own peril.
Subscribe to Comments
Comment RSS More on the MOAA Don't Ask, Don't Tell Survey
I am simply going to reprint the statement that I received from the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA). It is clear and coherent. Here is yesterday's post on the subject which essentially documents Elaine Donnelly's misuse and misrepresentation of the information. Draw your own conclusions. This via Col Marv Harris, USAF (Ret) who was most courteous. Emphasis added.
Late last summer it became very evident that the subject of gays in the military was gaining visibility, and the possibility existed that the issue would be raised by the executive or legislative branch, and there might be hearings in the 111th Congress. We anticipated that MOAA's Board of Directors would want to discuss this subject at the November meeting and develop a position, since the issue could come up before the next Board meeting in April 2009.
To seek some member input, MOAA developed a five-question survey for MOAA members and put it on the MOAA web site and highlighted it in the legislative update. Web surveys aren't a reliable tool, but it was our only option to let members respond because we did not have time to develop a mail-out survey to a statistically valid random sample of members before the November meeting.
As it turned out, only about 500 people took the survey over 11 days. Because of the low response and indications that some non-members were passing the survey around to their friends in an effort to skew the results, we concluded that the results could not be considered a valid representation of member views and removed the link to the survey from our web site. Only recently did we learn that the data was still accessible if someone had written down the original link to it. We've since removed it.
The Board, in determining its position, considered inputs from members of the Board (particularly those currently serving), the Currently Serving Advisory Committee, and the MOAA staff. They agreed that the survey results were too skimpy and unreliable to be of any validity.
The position the Board approved is:
"The 1993 'don't ask, don't tell' policy is grounded in statute. MOAA's primary concern continues to be sustaining a cohesive, effective, and resilient US military. If Congress or the Administration proposes a change in the statute, MOAA will continue to look to senior military leadership to assess any internal effect on readiness or our military missions that this may have."
We are declining to provide a copy of the survey or discuss the results. The survey was statistically invalid for the reasons stated above, and therefore not a reliable indicator of how a population feels about an issue
The military is afraid to post the results because they don't want to admit that the majority of service members do not care if they work alongside an openly gay member. It is true, most guys don't care about a person's sexuality as long as it is not imposed directly onto them which most gays are very good at not imposing on someone of a different sexual orientation.
Post new comment