Peter W. Pace, the Marine Corp General who has served a two-year term as the Pentagon’s top soldier – Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – will not be renominated for a second term. Most chairs serve for at least four years. Pace’s tenure will expire in September.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said at a Pentagon news conference on June 8 that his original intention was to renominate Pace, but in conversations with Senators of both parties, he concluded that those hearings would end up being a divisive rehash of past policy in Iraq rather than a focus on the future.

“I have decided that at this moment in our history, the nation, our men and women in uniform, and General Pace himself would not be well served by a divisive ordeal in selecting the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Gates said.

Pace has served on the Joint Chiefs for six years, the entire course of the Iraq war. The first four years were as vice chair.

Gates said that Admiral Michael G. Mullen, 60, the current Chief of Naval Operations, would be nominated for the job.

Pace gained the enmity of the GLBT community earlier this year when he called gays immoral during a March interview with the Chicago Tribune. He said, “I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts …. I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way.”

He later tried to partially retract the statement, saying that he was expressing his personal beliefs and should have stuck to commenting on the official policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) that allows gays to serve in the military so long as they do not disclose their sexual orientation.

Gates did not say Pace’s comments on gays affected his decision, but given how views on whether or not to repeal DADT have split along party lines, at least some Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee might have pressed Pace on the subject during confirmation hearings.

The gay issue alone likely would not have been sufficient to derail Pace’s nomination, but it was yet another distraction for an administration that prefers not to talk about gays at all. It already is facing a growing controversy over anti-gay statements by another of its nominees, James Holsinger, to be U.S. Surgeon General.

“Perhaps the LGBT community has turned a corner in the fight against homophobia when General Peter Pace and Isaiah Washington [who starred on TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy”] both lose their jobs in the same week,” said Steve Ralls, spokesperson for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “Though we may never know if concerns about General Pace’s homophobic remarks played a role in his decision not to seek re-confirmation, it seems reasonable to assume that the controversy he ignited weighed on Gate’s mind. General Pace’s remarks are still fresh in the memory of many of our troops, and no doubt still fresh in the memory of many senators, too.”