Discharged linguists - Tilting at Windmills

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Charles Peters

> But I should credit the Post for recently putting on its front page the story, reported here several months ago, of how the Pentagon stupidly discharged fluent Arabic speakers simply because they were gay, even though they were desperately needed by our forces in Iraq. The Post's Anne Hull found Kathleen Glover working in Washington for a swimming-pool maintenance company, "skimming leaves and testing chlorine levels." She had been trained in Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, Calif., but she was, like 37 other linguists, discharged for homosexuality.