Liberals may not care how their agenda cripples the military, but some leaders in the Pentagon sure do. Behind closed doors, the idea of enlisting people who are confused about their own gender is hugely unpopular with most top defense officials, the media are reporting. And at least one of those officials, Air Force General Paul Selva, is letting the Senate know it. In a hearing of the Armed Services Committee, Selva went to bat for the service chiefs, key brass, and other military leaders who thought America had turned the page on these distractions with the election of Donald Trump. Unfortunately for them, the social engineering that ravaged our readiness and the morale of our troops under Obama shows no signs of slowing down — thanks to the 23 Republicans who seem intent on partnering with liberals to fund it.

No one was probably more surprised by the defection than defense bosses like Selva, who were under the impression Republicans wanted to restore the military, not debilitate it. Like us, he wonders who these members were representing when they voted to spend $3.7 billion on military sex changes. Not the American people, only 23 percent of whom are on board with the idea. Not taxpayers, who would be diverting money from the military’s assignment to gender reassignment. Not our troops, who’ve already been warned they’ll have to deal with biological men in women’s showers, “male pregnancies,” and off-duty drag. And certainly not most military leaders, who, Selva argues, have major concerns with the implications of such a policy.

Americans already know the impact on their wallets. What the service chiefs want to know is the impact on standards, readiness, and recruitment. “I am an advocate of every qualified person who can meet the physical standards to serve in our uniformed services to be able to do so,” General Selva told the Senate. “Our decision to delay the accessions … was largely based on a disagreement on the science of how mental health care and hormone therapy for transgender individuals would help solve the medical issues that are associated with gender dysphoria.” Considering the implications for everything from living quarters to deployment policy, Selva and others want time to study the issue more thoroughly. Amazingly, liberals even object to that! Calling it “willful ignorance” to weigh the consequences, Aaron Belkin, director of the radical Palm Center, claims “there is no scientific dispute.”

He’s right. Even the liberal American Psychological Association (APA) considers gender dysphoria a mental illness. As FRC’s Peter Sprigg spells out in his policy paper, “Psychiatrist Sander Breiner declares, ‘[W]hen an adult who is normal in appearance and functioning believes there is something ugly or defective in their appearance … there is a psychological problem.’ Another psychiatrist, Rick Fitzgibbons, calls it ‘a fixed false belief … specifically a delusion.’ Psychiatrist Paul McHugh declares, ‘It is a disorder of the mind. Not a disorder of the body.’” Even more convincing, “A recent comprehensive review of the scientific literature, co-authored by McHugh and his colleague Lawrence S. Mayer, undermines several of the key premises of the transgender movement. They explain: ‘The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be "a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported by scientific evidence.’“

No matter how loudly transgender activists declare that hormone therapy and gender-reassignment surgery are "medically necessary,” it doesn’t make it so when the science is lacking. Just last year, the Department of Health and Human Services declined to mandate Medicare coverage for such surgery because “there is not enough high quality evidence” to determine whether it “improves health outcomes.”

Even the military’s most famous transgender case — Chelsea (Bradley) Manning — doesn’t exactly make a case for their stability. If anyone’s reinforced our concerns about letting the gender-confused serve, it’s the man arrested for releasing over 700,000 confidential documents to the website Wikileaks and convicted on 21 counts, including seven counts of espionage.

The bottom line is this: The military wasn’t built to advance “tolerance.” Its job is to fight and win wars. And that job is severely compromised when it’s forced to accept unhealthy men and women in the phony name of “fairness.” Despite what the Left argues, this isn’t a question of equality. Try to enlist with a mouthful of cavities or flat feet. In the end, it’s not the military’s responsibility to turn Americans into people fit to serve. It’s the military’s job to find people who are already qualified to do so.

Originally published here.

HHS a Cut Above on Liberal Sex Ed

When the American people elected Donald Trump, they won a lot more than the White House. They also won a makeover of government agencies bogged down by eight years of radical social policy. Nowhere is that more obvious than the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Secretary Tom Price is already making his mark on the office, starting with the appointment of several key conservatives. Now, seven months into the new administration, big changes are already on the horizon.

With the help of former FRCers Charmaine Yoest and Teresa Manning, HHS leaders are making deep cuts in funding for the liberal sex education programs that have plagued parents for almost a decade. More than 81 “teen pregnancy prevention” programs have already been notified that their checks are already canceled or will be as soon as the fiscal year ends. “Due to changes in program priorities, it has been determined that it is in the best interest of the federal government to no longer continue [your] funding,” read the letter obtained by the LA Times. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to most, not since Valerie Huber, a longtime leader in sexual risk avoidance circles, took the job as the chief of staff for HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. Before her tour at HHS, Valerie managed Ascend (formerly the National Abstinence Education Association), which empowers teenagers to make positive choices about sex.

Now, instead of letting politics dictate what programs to fund, HHS is relying on the Left’s worst nightmare: science! For years, the government’s own programs have shown how ineffective Obama’s if-it-feels-good-do-it-with-a-condom approach has been. So if liberals are upset with the department’s new approach, they’ll have to take it up with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which just validated her holistic approach in a sweeping study of its own. In a revealing report, CDC officials make it clear that teaching kids to save sex for marriage might just spare them from a long list of other health risks. Students in grades 9-12 who made positive decisions about sex were just as likely (or more!) to avoid other dangerous behaviors. “Virginity among teenagers of all ages correlates closely with the presence of married parents. Each change in family structure during adolescence (from married to divorced, from single to married, or from divorced to stepfamily) increases the risk of initiation of sexual intercourse for many of the teenage children in these unions.”

HHS was already shaping up to be a huge headache for the radical Left. But now, even Congress is lending a helping hand by putting perhaps the most conservative Labor-HHS appropriations bill on the table ever. Jam-packed with conscience protections, abstinence education, a Planned Parenthood defund, and bans on fetal tissue research, Secretary Price and House Republicans are making quite a team.

Originally published here.

Faster Than a Speeding Ballot!

America’s election system is far from perfect — and FRC’s Ken Blackwell knows it. Today, as one of the members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, he’s committed to fixing that. At the first meeting of Trump’s hand-picked board, Ken and 11 others will start the process of “review[ing] the complex system of American elections and see what new vulnerabilities and new threats are in play.” As Ohio’s former secretary of state, Ken has plenty of experience in the arena. “I’ve constantly worked to make sure that all of the traps have been run, all of the reviews have been taken, to make sure that not one legal ballot is negated by an illegal ballot, and that we clean up our voter rolls to reduce vulnerabilities in the system,” he said.

Although liberals are bashing the commission as a fraud, Ken says it’s no different than system check-ups other government agencies have run over the years. “The notion that this commission is one that should not exist, and the false narrowing of the mission to kill it in the crib, I find to be offensive.” In his opening statement today, Ken reminded Americans that “people get the government they vote for.” But, he continues:

This argument begs the question of whether voters did in fact elect the individuals who take their oaths of office. How do citizens know which candidate actually won in any given election? Election results are legitimate only to the extent that the returns include every legal vote — and only those legal votes — undiluted by fraudulent or otherwise unacceptable votes… People often speak of the right to vote. But in actuality there are two voting rights. The first is the electoral franchise: the right to cast a ballot that is tabulated to determine the outcome of regimes. The second is a concomitant right for each voter not to have his legitimate vote diluted or cancelled by an illegal vote.

His commitment — and the commitment of the president’s commission — is to preserve those rights for every American. To hear more about how, check out Ken’s latest interviews on the subject.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.