WASHINGTON — President Biden will grant sweeping pardons to veterans convicted of consensual same-sex conduct, the White House announced Tuesday, despite the fact that as a senator he voted for one of the landmark bills banning gays from serving in the military.
Biden, 81, is scheduled to announce the pardons before celebrating the 55th anniversary of the modern gay rights movement with pop star Elton John at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan on Friday.
“While it is not possible to give exact figures, the government estimates that several thousand people have been convicted for consensual conduct. UCMJ Article 125 “This individual may be eligible for pardon,” a Biden administration official said at a news conference.
“This is a historic injustice, and the President is taking this historic step to ensure we fulfill our sacred duty to care for all of our service members, veterans, and their families.”
Biden is spending a full week preparing at Camp David ahead of Thursday’s CNN debate with former President Donald Trump, and it’s unclear whether he will speak publicly about mass amnesty or his own responsibility for historical discrimination in the military.
Biden as a Senator Voted in 1993 For the legislation that enacted the final version of the Pentagon’s gay military ban, known as the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which, despite its name, allowed service members to be expelled and punished if they were exposed as gay against their will.
Both Biden, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and Trump have been courting the support of gay voters ahead of a close election expected to be decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of battleground states. Former first lady Melania Trump hosted a Log Cabin Republicans gathering at her Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, in April and plans to host a similar event at Trump Tower in New York next month.
Biden has a mixed political record on LGBT rights.
Biden was one of 32. Senate Democrats who voted for a federal ban on same-sex marriage in 1996.
He was in 1994 Proposed Rules It would ban schools receiving federal funding from “promoting homosexuality as a positive lifestyle choice.”
When Biden took office in 2012, he said he had “no problem” with same-sex marriage, prompting some Democrats to change their position, and in 2021 he rescinded Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.
Biden nominated the first openly gay Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate, Pete Buttigieg, as Secretary of Transportation in 2021. This comes after President Trump appointed the nation’s first gay Cabinet-level official, Rick Grenell, as Acting Director of National Intelligence in 2020.
Mass pardons are rare in U.S. history and this is the second such pardon issued by President Biden, who issued a mass pardon just before the 2022 midterm elections for people convicted under federal law for simple marijuana possession, none of whom had served time in prison.
As a presidential candidate in 2019, Biden had promised to release “everyone” incarcerated for marijuana, but some of the estimated 2,600 federal marijuana inmates incarcerated for marijuana trafficking said they had failed to fulfill that promise through mass pardons, sparking protests outside the White House decrying Biden.
