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The national security concern is blackmailability. You can't be blackmailed for what you openly do. So that's a fake reason.
I think the real reason is OPM doesn't want to give security clearances to icky people. Like homosexuals in the early 90s or people who admit to jerking it to furry porn today. And back in the early 90s openly gay people complained that the blackmail excuse didn't make sense since it isn't a secret that they're gay.
I would like national security to be correctly prioritized. And I'm skeptical that filtering out icky gays and furries is actually pursuing that goal. Especially when the given justifications are obviously false. But I also don't suppose an Executive Order 12968 but for shota furry enthusiasts is likely to be signed anytime soon.
What kind of openly gay people complained, the angry kind that will throw national security under the bus to win an internet argument, or the quiet ones [who are much less likely to take the government to court over getting denied a clearance for it in the first place]?
@thrownaway24e89172 more clearly elucidated the problem with this than I managed to- being Out and Proud is fundamentally at odds with having enough self control to shut the fuck up and not create problems for [from the government's viewpoint] fundamentally selfish reasons. Not being able to put your identity away on the clock, or worse, having a chip on one's shoulder about it (which is what "Proud" means), is the risk factor here.
There were a pretty sizable number of Sipple-like people, who were pretty quiet about things and did not openly go nuclear warfare, but were also still out of the closet and did not believe it was good policy at the time.
That's been more common later, but Watkins first was drafted in the late 1960s, and while a bit of a progressive putz by military standards, was pretty much a poster child for don't-start-nothing-won't-be-nothing.
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I have no reason to think "out and proud" people or furries are any more likely to sell secrets to the Russians or leak them on the internet.
I have absolutely no reason to think this is a true statement. In the absence of compelling evidence I'm going to continue to think that OPM just generally doesn't like icky sorts of people like this furry porn guy. Not that liking Pride and "out and proud" has any correlation with leaking secrets.
This guy is right to take them to court. I'm not faulting him for getting screwed by a Federal bureaucrat and going to court. If they don't like that they can make the lifestyle polygraph focused on actual blackmailability rather than unrelated society conservative disapproval of porn and gay sex, as they traditionally have.
It harms national security to have OPM deny people based on bogus reasons, like being gay in 1994 or earlier. There is a responsibility on OPM's part to correctly deny blackmail vulnerable people and not incorrectly deny people they just like. I don't think they do a great job at this. That comes at a real price.
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