
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 17, 1993                   TAG: 9311170024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

NAVY TOLD TO COMMISSION GAY MAN

For a fifth time this year, a court has ordered a homosexual in the military restored to service. Six years after midshipman Joseph Steffan was forced to leave the U.S. Naval Academy, a court ordered him graduated and commissioned as a naval officer.

The decision Tuesday suggested that the final word on homosexuals in the military may be spoken by the courts - very likely the Supreme Court - and not by Congress or President Clinton.

"America's hallmark has been to judge people by what they do and not by who they are," Chief Judge Abner Mikva wrote for the three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington.

The panel said the Navy's ban on declared homosexuals was based on prejudice and served no legitimate purpose.

"It is fundamentally unjust to abort a most promising military career solely because of a truthful confession of a sexual preference different from that of the majority, a preference untarnished by even a scintilla of misconduct," the court held.

Steffan, whose stellar performance at the Naval Academy won him an appointment as a battalion commander his senior year, was forced to resign in 1987 - six weeks before his scheduled graduation in the top 10 percent of his class.

Steffan said he looked forward to serving the country as a naval officer and added:

"The opinion underlies a very important reality . . . that no court decision, no action by Congress or the president or anyone, is going to change the fundamental reality that gay people have always served in the military, and we always will serve in the military."

Steffan was among 10 outstanding students who had been chosen to be battalion commanders.

But the day after he said he was gay, academy officials lowered his military performance grade from an A-minus to an F, according to his lawyer, Marc Wolinsky.

Steffan, 29, is now a third-year law student at the University of Connecticut.

by CNB