A mid-July pro-transgender vote on the House floor prompted President Donald Trump to reject the Pentagon’s 2016 endorsement of soldiers who have “gender identity” problems, according to Politico.
Trump’s decision was intended to ease passage of the 2018 defense authorization bill, which includes $1.6 billion for the president’s border wall.
But the bill is being held up by a dispute over funding to cover the costs of medical care offered by the prior administration to military adults, spouses and their children who say they want to live as “transgender” members of the opposite sex. According to Politico:
The transgender fight first surfaced in the House a few weeks ago. With the backing of almost the entire GOP conference, Hartzler offered an amendment to a defense authorization bill that would ban funding for gender reassignment surgeries and treatments for transgender active-duty personnel.
Republican supporters were shocked when a group of [23] mostly moderate Republicans teamed up with 190 Democrats to kill the [amendment] effort in a 209-214 vote…
Under intense pressure from moderates in the Tuesday Group to reject the idea, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his team shied [away from another vote]…
That’s when [GOP] lawmakers turned to the White House for help. They figured the administration could speed up a decision and settle the dispute once and for all.
According to Axios, “House conservatives, especially Rep. Mark Meadows of the House Freedom Caucus, started threatening not to vote for the military appropriations bill unless the transgender issues were resolved.”
Trump responded by using his power as commander-in-chief to exclude people who want to live as members of the opposite sex from the U.S. military so removing the need for GOP leaders to ensure passage of the authorization bill.
Democrats responded by slamming Trump, and praising cross-dressing soldiers. In Washington, Rep. Joe Kennedy, who chairs the Democrats’ transgender caucus, held a press conference where he shook hands with an 11-year-old child who has adopted the name of “Blue” to avoid recognizing his or her own biological sex. The child’s father is an Air Force serviceman, so the pro-transgender policies adopted by former President Barack Obama would have supplied the child with free pro-transgender encouragement and sterilization drugs.
The public and GOP opposition to the Pentagon’s Obama-era pro-transgender policies is linked to the unpopular campaign by transgender groups to remove and replace society’s normal rules for helping men and women compete and complement each other. But the GOP leadership is more concern about business priorities and is willing to minimize conflict with the Democrats by not fighting against their social-issue priorities.
The floor vote on the amendment was reported by Breitbart News:
Twenty-four Republicans banded together on Thursday to defeat an amendment which would have ended former President Barack Obama’s 2016 policy of funding “gender-reassignment” surgery for soldiers who want to live as members of the opposite sex.
The amendment to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act was offered by Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R, Mo.). It would have prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for the non-military medical task of converting healthy soldiers into “transgender” soldiers who face lifelong dependence on hormones and surgery.
The July 13 vote saw Democrats vote in lockstep to defeat the amendment, despite the national unpopularity of the transgender ideology. They were joined by 24 Republicans who broke with their party to assist the Democrats to defeat the amendment, without any visible objections by the GOP’s business-focused leadership.
After the amendment vote, Florida GOP Rep. Brian Mast highlighted the impact of the pro-transgender policy on military spending:
I don’t think the military should be paying for any elective surgery, whether it be for transgender surgery or cosmetic surgery. Everything we look for in Defense Department spending has to make the warfighter better off and safer on the battlefield. No question, this [transgender policy] doesn’t.
I’ve been on the battlefield … I have [veteran] friends who can’t get oxygen treatment, who can’t get the things they need for their spine, or can’t get the best wheelchairs or body armor… This is going to be where we should be spending our money. That should make sense to everybody.
The Politico article is here. To read more about the transgender ideology, click here:
The transgender ideology demands that the federal government force Americans to accept “gender identity” sex-switching claims made by each person, regardless of scientific data about genetics, biology, and the variety of normal behavior and appearances shown by normal, equal, different, and complementary women and men, boys and girls.
The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked popular social rules for how Americans handle the many differences between different, complementary and equal men and women.
These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.