The Patriot Post® · Friday Opinion

Today’s Editors’ Choice

• Tony Perkins: Defense Debate: Trans, Plans, and Auto-Repeals
• David Harsanyi: Masterpiece Cakeshop Is Fighting for the First Amendment, Not Against Gay Marriage
• Hans von Spakovsky: Don’t Be Fooled, the Supreme Court Handed the President a Big Victory

To view all of today’s opinion, click here.

Opinion in Brief

Tony Perkins: “In a new paper, Peter Sprigg estimates (based on the Left’s own assumptions!) that opening the [military] doors to people who identify as transgender will cost a whopping $3.7 billion over the next 10 years for medical costs and lost deployment time. … With the price tag of $89,050 for female-to-male procedures and $110,450 for male-to-female procedures, taxpayers would be forking over hundreds of millions of dollars a year for people who are just using the military as their free ticket to elective surgery! And that’s just the surgery — not the cost of hormone treatment and counseling, which can run in the thousands per person. To put it in perspective, over the next ten years America would be spending roughly half of its annual ballistic defense budget on elective sexual reassignment surgery! While our troops are literally scavenging museums for jet parts, which would you rather pay for: hundreds of gender transitions or 22 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Planes? Obama’s extreme transgender agenda or 3,700 tomahawk missiles? Political correctness run amok or half of our annual cyber defense budget? I’m sure ISIS will sleep better at night knowing that we sacrificed 116 Chinook helicopters so that our troops could get radical makeovers.”