Trump on Military: Readiness, Set, Go
It hasn’t been the easiest of decades for the U.S. military. Eight years of living on a shoestring budget with a commander in chief who cared more about promoting the letters LGBT than preventing W-A-R took its toll. Now, 14 months into the gutsy leadership of President Trump, things are finally starting to change. And on Friday, Americans saw how much.
It hasn’t been the easiest of decades for the U.S. military. Eight years of living on a shoestring budget with a commander in chief who cared more about promoting the letters LGBT than preventing W-A-R took its toll. Now, 14 months into the gutsy leadership of President Trump, things are finally starting to change. And on Friday, Americans saw how much.
For our troops, the weekend started off with a bang. They cheered the news that Trump had followed through on his promise to start rebuilding the military — first with a $61 billion bump in funding and then with a rejection of the political correctness that upended the military under Barack Obama. In the roller-coaster months since President Trump’s first transgender announcement, no one was quite sure how the White House’s formal policy would take shape. To most people’s relief, the Pentagon’s final memo did what the commander in chief promised: Put readiness first.
Under the memo released Friday, both Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson signed their names to a 40-page document that will help free our military from the radical grip of the Obama years. Building on the GOP platform he swore to uphold, the president took a strong and decisive step away from the uncertainty that former Secretary Ash Carter injected into the military when he tore down the barriers to transgender service. “Military standards are high for a reason,” Secretary Mattis wrote in the report. “The trauma of war, which all service members must be prepared to face, demands physical, mental, and moral standards that will give all service members the greatest chance to survive their ordeal with their bodies, minds, and moral character intact. The Department would be negligent to sacrifice those standards for any cause.”
In the new policy, people who identify as transgender but who haven’t been formally diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” and have not undergone a “gender transition” are free to serve or join the military — with one catch: They must serve as their biological sex. On the other hand, anyone with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria (which the Pentagon defines as someone who requires “substantial medical treatment, including through medical drugs or surgery”) are barred from the military, except under limited circumstances. While there are certain caveats, including when a person entered the military and in what state of transition, the administration’s decision sends a powerful message that the days of reckless social engineering in the military are over.
After digging into the science and the instability Obama’s policy created, Mattis and his team were more convinced than ever that letting this type of gender chaos into the military presents a “considerable risk” to its “effectiveness and lethality.” And they had more than enough evidence to back it up. The memo does a great job dismantling the flawed RAND study that Carter used to prop up Obama’s move. DOD insists that RAND “mischaracterizes or overstates the reports on which it rests its conclusions” (p. 39). “In fact,” officials write, “the RAND study itself repeatedly emphasized the lack of quality data on these issues and qualified its conclusions accordingly” — a fact the last administration never bothered to mention.
The Defense Department also takes Carter’s regime to task, explaining that it found several instances where “standards were adjusted or relaxed to accommodate service by transgender persons” (p. 19) — which is somewhat ironic, given the Left’s insistence on “equality.” To bend the rules and justify its decision, Carter’s team had to ignore stacks of research from its own ranks. For example, people who suffer from “gender dysphoria” in the military are eight times more likely to commit suicide (p. 21) and nine times more likely to have negative “mental health encounters.” And while the taxpayer-funded treatments go on, their service peers are the ones left picking up the slack. “To access recruits with higher rates of anticipated unavailability for deployment thrusts a heavier burden on those who would deploy more often” (p. 27).
While Democrats like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) fire off angry tweets, arguing that the president’s position “cuts directly across the drive for equality,” DOD points out just how mistaken they are. If any policy was unfair, it was Obama’s! As Defense officials point out, if a service member had to have genital reconstruction surgery because of a traumatic combat injury, they would have been disqualified from military service without a waiver. But if someone decided to change sexes because they were struggling with their identity, their waiver would be granted (p. 28). That’s how twisted Obama’s agenda was — rewarding service members with mental struggles on one hand and punishing hurting heroes on the other.
Meanwhile, as military leaders have said for years, there is no such thing as a “right to serve” in the military.
“The vast majority of Americans from ages 17-24 — that is, 71 percent — are ineligible to join the military for medical, mental, or behavioral reasons,” Mattis points out. “Transgender persons with gender dysphoria are no less valued members of our nation than all other categories of persons who are disqualified from military service. The Department honors all citizens who wish to dedicate, and perhaps even lay down, their lives in defense of the nation — even when the Department, in the best interest of the military, must decline to grant their wish” (p. 6).
Unfortunately, the far Left isn’t interested in the facts or the potential harms of Obama’s position. All it cares about is using the military to advance its fringe agenda at the very real expense of national security. The Pentagon’s responsibility, Mattis reminds everyone, is to fight and win wars. “In light of the various sources of uncertainty in this area and informed by the data collected since the Carter policy took effect, the Department is not convinced that these risks could be responsibly dismissed or that even negligible harms should be incurred.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called the president’s decision “cowardly.” As usual, she’s wrong. Few things take more guts than standing up to liberal extremists and doing what’s in the best interest of America’s security — and the brave men and women in uniform. We should all applaud the Trump administration for making decisions that keep our military strong and our country safe.
Originally published here.
Craigslist Gets Up Close With Personals
Who says nothing good comes out of Washington? Just last week, Congress took a giant step toward ending sex trafficking when it passed Rep. Ann Wagner’s (R-MO) bill. Together, Republicans and Democrats stood up to the online businesses that are knowingly selling women and children into slavery. And barely a week later, the rest of the Internet is taking notice.
Craigslist, the massive online marketplace, is putting a halt to one section of its site: the “personals” section. As NPR puts it, “You can still find furniture or a roommate on Craigslist. But ads seeking romance or sexual connections are no longer going to be available.” Executives at the company say they made the decision after the House and Senate passed its Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. The move, they think, will help drive out the predators from their pages.
Since the law holds advertisers responsible for any trafficking their sites help facilitate, more companies are taking steps to protect themselves from a fine or lawsuit. “Any tool or service can be misused,” Craigslist said. “We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day. To the millions of spouses, partners and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!”
Amazingly, the LGBT lobby is upset by the move, complaining that Craigslist was one of the most popular sites for “men looking for sex with men” and “women looking for sex with women.” “The news,” one reporter writes, “will come as a blow to thousands of Americans who facilitated … sexual encounters on the platform.” What do they suggest? Continue letting women and children be exploited just so they can find hook-up partners? That’s exactly the kind of culture that’s feeding this dark and insatiable world of sex slavery.
Craigslist is doing its part to end one of the greatest human rights crises of our time. Others should take their cues and follow. The suffering has to stop. And thanks to Congress, more companies than ever have the incentive to help.
Originally published here.
Court to Edwards: Stop Trying to Legislate!
Every once in a while, a court gets it right. And in Louisiana, there was no better time for that than now, when a dangerous lawsuit threatened the rule of law.
Like a lot of liberals, Gov. Bel Edwards (D) thinks religious convictions should be surrendered in order to contract with the government. Last year, the legislature refused to go along with his policy of forcing any entity contracting with the state to agree to special privileges for people who identify as LGBT — including genderless bathrooms and showers. Gov. Edwards then took matters into his own hands, issuing an executive order to accomplish the Left’s objective of crushing religious freedom.
It’s state Attorney General Jeff Landry’s (R) job to ensure that Louisiana is abiding by the Constitution. This overreach, he knew, did not. When government contracts started streaming through his office for approval, he refused to sign them. Angry that Landry wouldn’t rubber-stamp his lawlessness, Gov. Edwards sued him. After two rulings went against him, Edwards gambled it all on an appeal to the State Supreme court. And last week, he lost.
“That’s the problem right now in this country,” Attorney General Landry told me last year on “Washington Watch.” “No one wants to respect the rule of law and the process. Everyone wants to circumvent or short-cut it. And in Louisiana, we’re just not going to allow that.” The justices agreed, taking issue with the way Edwards bypassed the legislature to impose his personal liberal agenda on the state. Still, the governor defended his actions, insisting, “I, for one, do not think discrimination of any kind has a place in our society, much less the workplace. More importantly, Louisiana’s diversity is what makes it the greatest state in the union. Unfortunately, this puts us on the wrong side of history.”
First of all, blocking people with religious convictions from government contracts is what’s discriminatory — not his politically correct notion of “tolerance.” Secondly, if Gov. Edwards wants to change the law, then take the issue to legislators. Don’t make a unilateral decision to do their jobs for them. If the public agrees with his misguided ideas on discrimination, prove it. Pass a law. Don’t do through the governor’s office what you can’t do democratically and shouldn’t do constitutionally.
General Landry, for one, is happy to move on. He hopes the court’s decision “will end the governor’s waste of precious taxpayer resources in defense of his unconstitutional actions. The governor should live within the Constitution; and I will continue to stand for the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
