He was also early among Republicans to support that New START treaty with Russia, when more partisan senators were going the other way.
The Don’t Ask vote was, of course, the right thing to do for the men and women who protect America on a daily basis. The idea that dedicated, highly trained service members should be forced out of jobs they do well simply because they are gay was ultimately un-American.
For Sen. Voinovich, the appeal of a “yes” vote may have gone beyond the issue of basic fairness. One issue he focused heavily on in the Senate was improving the “human capital” in government. Sen. Voinovich believes that the federal government should strive to be the kind of employer that can attract the top talent it needs to be effective.
In fact, his colleague, Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, who worked on those issues with him, called Sen. Voinovich the “father of human capital” in a tribute in the Senate just last week.
These concepts carry over to the military, and the Don’t Ask policy does not fit with them. First, the armed services simply could not be attractive enough as an employer that needs a constant flow of new recruits with a policy that was as blatantly discriminatory as Don’t Ask. The Don’t Ask law also created the wasteful and costly exercise of litigating the expulsion of gay soldiers.
What could be more antithetical to the notion of building human capital than a system that spends piles of money trying to expel from jobs people who do good work and do not want to leave?
Finally, in many cases the gay soldiers tossed from the armed services were expertly trained at high cost to the military. In some cases, one expelled airman can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars of military investment in training. And expulsion can require an equal new investment in training a replacement.
Even though repeal of Don’t Ask fits so well philosophically with Sen. Voinovich’s personal views on government, he was oddly quiet about the core question of repeal. Like other Republicans, he allowed procedural questions to stand as reasons not to act on repeal without really saying where he stood.
Even Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach, a gay aviator who grew up in Ohio, couldn’t get an answer from Sen. Voinovich. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach became a celebrated case when his sexual preference was revealed to the Air Force against his will by police investigating a bogus claim against him. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach said his letters and phone calls to Sen. Voinovich were never returned.
It was gratifying for him and other gay and lesbian service members that Ohio’s two senators, in the end, both voted for repeal.
Cox News Service