Tomorrow, the military will mail paper surveys to 150,000 spouses of military servicemembers to gauge their reaction to repealing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law. The survey is part of a larger Pentagon effort to study how allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would affect military and family life. It comes on the heels of a controversial and highly criticized survey of 400,000 active military and reserve members.

Pentagon sources tell me that this second questionnaire will be analyzed in a qualitative, rather than a quantitative manner. The military will try to assess if repealing the policy will affect military retention and recruitment, and the importance of the issue in the context of other concerns like educational opportunities and medical benefits. The Pentagon will work with groups like Servicemembers United to reach out to the spouses of gay and lesbian troops.

“We are asking the family members, if we were to change the law, are there any impacts at all that might affect family readiness and military community life,” DoD spokesperson Cynthia Smith told me. “We understand that military spouses play an important role in a servicemembers’ decision about whether or not they’re going to stay in the military. It’s a retention issue. It’s aslo a recruiting issue becaue we know that spouses are influencers in local communities.”

Interestingly, one source told me that the Pentagon expects DADT to rank low on the list of priorities and said that past focus groups have shown that family members have other, more pressing concerns.

Military spouses will have until September 27th to complete and mail in the survey.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell scholar Nathaniel Frank — formerly of the Palm Center — is out with a new report detailing how the ban against open service undermines the military — which supporters of the policy claim to be preserving. But as Frank explains, “[f]ar from protecting military readiness, the policy has harmed it, sacrificing badly needed personnel that is replaced with less qualified talent; undermining cohesion, integrity, and trust through forced dishonesty; hurting the morale of gay troops by limiting their access to support services; wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars; invading the privacy of all service members—gay and non-gay alike—by casting a cloud of suspicion and uncertainty over the intimate lives of everyone in the armed forces; and damaging the military’s reputation which makes it harder to recruit the best and brightest America has to offer.”

Frank’s report substantiates what many of the recent personal stories of closeted soldiers have described anecdotally. He lists 12 ways in which the military is harmed by the policy (I’m excerpting the top five below):

1. Waste the talents of thousands of essential personnel with “critical skills” who were fired for their sexual orientation — 757 troops with “critical occupations” were fired under the policy between fiscal years 1994 and 2003.

2. Strike at the heart of unit cohesion by breaking apart cohesive fighting teams — a 2009 study published in Military Psychology found that sexual orientation disclosure is positively related to unit cohesion, while concealment and harassment are related negatively. Forcing troops to conceal their sexual orientation appears to reduce cohesion.

3. Hamper recruitment and retention by shrinking the pool of potential enlistees — an additional 41,000 qualified gay Americans might join if the ban were lifted, and an additional 4,000 personnel might remain in uniform

4. Lower the quality of military personnel by discharging capable gay troops leaving slots to be filled through “moral waivers” that admit felons, substance abusers, and other high-risk recruits.

5. Infect the morale of the estimated 66,000 gay, lesbian, and bisexual troops and their military peers who must serve in a climate of needless alienation, dishonesty, and fear

It’s worth pointing out that while these effects on military readiness are easily verifiable (by the Pentagon’s own reports no less), the claims from the other side about how repealing the policy would harm the institution have yet to be experienced by any of the 26 NATO allies that allow open service.

Matt Lewis has an interesting piece following the fallout from the Ann Coulter/HomoCon/WorldNetDaily controversy. To recap, this is the one in which the sharp-tounged but no longer terribly relevant Coulter was dropped from WorldNet’s “Taking America Back National Conference” for agreeing to speak at HomoCon, GOProud’s first annual conservative gay event. WND editor Joseph Farah punted on Coulter because, as he put it, “it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about taking America back when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very ‘unconservative’ agenda represented by GOProud.”

Well, Lewis tracked some up and coming conservative leaders and they took issue with Farah’s characterization of conservatism:

“Conservatism and gay rights are actually natural allies,” said S.E. Cupp, conservative columnist and author of “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity.” “Conservatism rightly seeks to keep the government out of our private lives, and when you strip away the politics of pop culture, it’s this assertion of privacy and freedom that the gay rights movement is essentially making.”

This is how institutions evolve and emerge within a conservative culture,” says Jon Henke, a libertarian-leaning blogger. “In time, gay people will be married, extending the valuable social institution of marriage to more people. In time, conservatives will argue that the positive impact that marriage has on the gay community is further evidence of the importance of the institution of marriage.”

National Review’s Dan Foster believes the changing attitudes are largely generational, but added that “a central thread of conservatism, going back to Edmund Burke, is…gradualism.”

The growing acceptance of gay rights within the younger faction of the conservative movement sounds promising, but somehow insufficient and even irrelevant. “In time,” a greater number of conservatives could very well argue about “the positive impact that marriage has on the gay community,” but gay people shouldn’t have to wait. Gradual public acceptance of marriage may be enough for some conservatives who already enjoys the benefits of full equality under the law, but I suspect it’s less acceptable to those still fighting for it.

Some older conservative leaders already agree with this. As Olson asked yesterday on MSNBC’ Andrea Mitchell Reports, “What could be, at the end of the day, more conservative than two loving people, that want to get married, that want to build a family, that want to be part of our neighborhoods and community — that is a conservative value.”