At last, the days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are numbered.

The House voted on Thursday, by a comfortable margin, to repeal it, and after the Senate Armed Services Committee also voted for repeal.

Now the full Senate must vote on it, and though the hypocritical and increasingly Neanderthal John McCain is rising on his hind legs to oppose it, the likelihood is that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” won’t survive 2010.

And good riddance to it.

This ludicrous policy, which required gays and lesbians to wall off their private lives in ways that no heterosexual had to do, was discriminatory at birth and more and more ludicrous as it grew older.

Openly gay soldiers were serving in the militaries of other countries that were members of Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing,” and those militaries noticed no adverse effects, nor did the coalition.

And our military, so short not only of able bodies but of skilled minds, was in no position to be cashiering the 14,000 gays and lesbians who got tossed because Bill Clinton didn’t have the guts to outlaw discrimination in the military in the first place.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it perfectly in Senate testimony on February 2: "No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, personally, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”

Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Gates, and the Joint Chiefs deserve praise for bringing this shameful period in our military to an end.

It should have happened a long time ago.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.