In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, poet and men's-movement pioneer Robert Bly asserted that if the U.S. followed the example of the ancient Mayans in Guatemala, no controversy would surround the issue of the ban on gays in the military. The highland Mayans, he said, recognized four stages for the growth of men—the boy, the warrior, the community man and the "echo" man stages. The warrior is "not considered a complete male." Only after being a community man, whose job is to take care of widows and orphans, can one attain echoness. An "echo" is "not exactly a man or a woman but a person who hears."

Senator Sam Nunn, Bly declared, seems "caught in an incomplete warrior phase, oppositional and polarized." Because the military establishment, which is likewise stuck in the warrior stage, wants "all shining of the feminine in the soldier to be invisible," Bly concluded that the new "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards gays "may quiet some of the fears of the soldiers just reaching warrior state; it saves them from daily reminders of their fragility."

Besides the Mayans, Bly mentioned three Americans who achieved "echo" status: Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. President Clinton "floats somewhere between the warrior and the community man; he isn't secure in either, but he could fight harder for the community." Bly concluded that "the process of male development must not rest solely in the mentality of warriors" such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs, he commented, keep themselves from imagining a wider vision in which "we can bless the warriors, as well as the gay men and women, and keep the sad and echoing face of Lincoln before us."

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