President Barack Obama is forcing the Pentagon to repeal its ban on transgender service members, meaning U.S. soldiers will soon be serving under the command of cross-dressing soldiers.
The policy change is another example of how progressives bypass Congress and the voters by using the military to promote and advance social changes nationwide. Since 2009, for example, the military has been used to aid illegal immigrants and to help change the definition of marriage so that it can include single-sex couples — regardless of the far-left policies’ impact on combat readiness and recruitment.
The repeal of the long-standing exclusion of cross-dressing transgender soldiers is coming “within weeks” or at least by the end of July, according to The Washington Post.
The Obama administration has been debating the new transgender-boosting policy for the better part of a year, and even now, insiders say the final policies are not set in stone. But the possible policy announcement comes a full six months after Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter set a time limit for the policy to be crafted.
The last public comments Carter made were last May when he said the issue was “complicated,” but he was still “confident we’re going to get to the right place in this.”
As USA Today reports, the new policy would order all branches of the military to implement new policies for recruiting, housing, and uniforms for transgender troops.
Ashley Broadway-Mack, the president of the American Military Partner Association, told the Post that his organization, which represents lesbian and gay and transgender service members, is “breathing a heavy sigh of relief” over the impending policy change.
Sue Fulton, a 1980 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and president of SPARTA, an organization of LGBT military service members, also insisted that allowing transgender soldiers just makes “common sense.” Earlier this month, Fulton wrote, “There is every indication that senior military leaders know that the 35-year-old policies on transgender service are out of date and need to be changed” and went on to praise the idea.
Fulton also went on to demand that the military pay for sex reassignment surgery.
The latter question was an issue LGBT activist Aaron Belkin demanded answers to in an editorial posted by Military Times. Belkin noted that the forthcoming policy would not be complete unless a full range of medical services were offered to transgender soldiers, including hormone therapy and full transitional surgery, all at the expense of taxpayers.
However, the military’s forced acceptance of transgender soldiers helps to advanced Obama’s domestic push for the transgender ideology.
In general, the transgender ideology says the state should require every American to validate every person’s choice of created “gender identity,” even though a man who wants to be a woman is still a man by every known scientific measure of evolutionary life. For example, an Oregon law recently allowed a jury to award $60,00 t0 a transgender teacher because other teachers declined to use the teacher’s preferred pronoun, which is “they” rather than “him” or “her.” New York City has also establish similar forced-speech rules.
The ideology’s claim that the state must enforce a new right to “gender identity” also means that the state must ignore and often dismantle many civic rules that evolved to help the two distinct sexes — men and boys, women and girls — meet their legally equal, but different and complementary, needs. For example, the transgender ideological demand means that single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms must opened up to people of the opposite sex, regardless of age, and without any verification of created “gender identity.”
As a result, it is now an offense in Washington State to ask a man in a woman’s bathroom if he thinks he is male or female. Similarly, Obama and gay advocacy groups have slammed a popular North Carolina law, dubbed HB2, because it requires people to undergo medical procedures before they can use a bathroom reserved for the opposite sex.
Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has been using the armed forces to promote progressive social policies — and also to lower the social status of soldiers and of conservative ideas.
For example, earlier this year, it was reported that soldiers at Fort Gordon in Georgia were forced to sit through an anti-white privilege program to train them out of their whiteness. Then last year, an Army ROTC program at Temple University drew ridicule when it instituted a “sexual-assault awareness” program, which forced male ROTC members to wear women’s high heels to get a feeling for what women go through each day.
In August of 2013, Washington watchdog group Judicial Watch also found military training documents informing soldiers that mainstream conservative political groups were “extremist” and should be treated as potential dangers to–and enemies of–the state.
Also in 2015, the Pentagon announced it would treat Bradley Manning — who released a huge amount of classified data to the nation’s enemies — as a woman named Chelsea.
Also this year, the Pentagon ordered senior commanders to begin prioritizing climate change and to “incorporate climate change impacts into plans and operations.”
Furthermore, Secretary Carter decreed in January that officials would force commanders to accept women in more than 200,000 combat slots — even though women have much lower strength and endurance than male soldiers.
In 2014, the administration announced it intended to alter policies to allow illegal migrants to join the military’s Military Accessions Vital to National Interest, or MAVNI, a program that allows foreign nationals who have some specialized training or skills to enter into U.S. Military service. The administration also demanded the Pentagon open up the military to illegals allowed to stay in the U.S. under Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Because the military is shrinking, these policies means that some Americans are being forced out of the military to make room for illegal-immigrant recruits. So far, the GOP-led Congress has not stopped that anti-American policy.
The examples of Obama’s social engineering of the armed services has been so blatant that one general spoke up last year.
In September, Major General Robert Dees (U.S. Army-Ret) said the military’s battle readiness, as well as its moral composition, was “being degraded” by all the social engineering sponsored by the Pentagon.
For that, General Dees blamed Obama:
In fact, social experimentation is improperly named because it’s not an experiment at all. It’s a top-driven mandate for social agendas that occurs by this administration within the military, which is a captive audience.
It is not enhancing our readiness; it declines our readiness. We’re spending more time on some of these social engineering projects than we are on developing and maintaining readiness in our force.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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