Army investigates anti-gay e-mails
By Michelle Tan - mtan@militarytimes.com
Posted : April 23, 2007

The Army continues to investigate a string of anti-gay e-mails allegedly sent from an Army sergeant to a man she was trying to recruit into the service.

The recruiter, identified in the e-mails and news reports as Sgt. Marcia Ramode, was working at Brownsville Recruiting Station in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has been suspended from her recruiting duties and is working at the New York City Recruiting Battalion headquarters at Fort Hamilton, N.Y., an Army spokesman said.

Corey Andrew Powell said Ramode contacted him after she found his r�sum� on Career Builder.com, according to a news release on the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network’s Web site.

In e-mails provided by Powell and posted to the Web site, Powell identified himself as gay in response to an e-mail from Ramode.

The documents show Ramode allegedly replying from her Recruiting Command e-mail address, “Well, if you are gay we don’t take you. You are considered unqualified.”

Powell and Ramode, 41, appear to have traded insults and barbs through March 2, with each e-mail escalating in anti-gay and racist language.

Powell wrote to Ramode, saying he was “stunned that the U.S. Army could afford to be so choosy” and compared recruiters he had seen to “pedophilic predators.”

To which Ramode allegedly replied, “You are definitely unqualified. Now take your gay self someplace else. We do not tolerate gay people like you in any part of the military.”

Powell replied by writing that “the gays would have had Osama [bin Laden] by now ... whereas you dudes can’t even find him!” and telling Ramode to “head off to the playground and find some new recruits.”

Powell and Ramode, who has been a sergeant since May 2001, could not be reached.

The Army is investigating the matter, a spokesman said.

“The matter has been referred through the U.S. Army Recruiting Command’s Staff Judge Advocate to the appropriate commander for review, investigation and appropriate action,” spokesman S. Douglas Smith said in a statement.

Under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, recruiters do not ask applicants about their sexual orientation, Smith said.

“If an applicant makes a statement that he or she is homosexual, the recruiter must inform the applicant in a professional manner that they are not eligible for enlistment,” he said.

Ellie