Politics & Power Quote by Diane Feinstein

Merit gets framed here as both moral principle and military asset, a neat two-for-one argument aimed at an audience that might not be moved by rights talk alone. Feinstein opens with a triad - competence, courage, willingness - the familiar cadence of civic virtue. It’s old-school American rhetoric, designed to sound uncontroversial, even inevitable. Then she pivots: the real controversy isn’t whether gays can serve, but whether the country is willing to live up to its own stated standards.

The subtext is a rebuke to the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” without naming it. By emphasizing “sexual orientation” as an irrelevant characteristic next to battlefield traits, she casts exclusion as irrational bureaucracy masquerading as tradition. The repeated “we deprive” is deliberate indictment: discrimination doesn’t merely harm the excluded; it weakens the institution doing the excluding. That’s strategic, because it shifts the debate from private morality to public consequence.

Her context is the late-20th/early-21st century Senate, where civil-rights arguments often had to be laundered through national-security pragmatism to have a chance. Feinstein’s intent is to make inclusion feel like patriotism, not cultural rebellion. “Rights of citizenship” is the key phrase: service becomes not just a job but a civic seal of belonging. Denying it marks people as second-class Americans - and, pointedly, makes the country smaller than it claims to be.