GOP National Defense Disorder

Certain Republican members of the US House of Representatives are as confused as Democrats about the American military’s constitutional responsibilities.

On July 13, some joined Democrats to vote down an amendment to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act that would have relieved the Pentagon of funding gender-transition surgeries.

Twenty-four GOP representatives, including Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent, Ryan Costello, Bryan Fitzpatrick and Bill Shuster, none of whom have performed military service, voted with unified Democrats to force the Pentagon to continue paying for gender reassignment/transition surgeries for troops who elect to live as members of the opposite sex.

Transgenderism is clinically-defined as gender dysphoria â€" aberrant, contra-biological feelings. Recommended treatments include psychological counseling, not publicly-funded enablement
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During the debate on her amendment, Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) argued that appropriations should be used exclusively for defense priorities: “The Obama transgender policy, …implemented without input from members of Congress, is ill-conceived and contrary to our goals of increasing troop readiness and investing defense dollars into…budget shortfalls… [W]e are subjecting taxpayers to high medical costs including up to $130,000 per transition surgery, lifetime hormone treatments, and additional surgeries to address the high percentage of individuals who experience complications.”
The Department of Defense website states that the United States military’s mission is “to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country.”

Nothing in its mission directs the Pentagon to indulge left-wing notions of gender-fluidity or to provide sexual psychiatry or transition surgeries. Amendment supporters cited national security issues. In fact, the policy impacts a critical element of the military’s mission: readiness.
Hartzler: “It makes no sense to create soldiers who are unable to fight…and unfair to nontransitioning individuals who must leave their families and deploy in their place.”

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a veteran, stated: “You’re joining the U.S. military. Choose what gender you are before you join. … We’re not stopping transgender people from joining. We’re saying taxpayers…are not going to foot the bill for it.”

Dent, Costello, Shuster, Fitzpatrick and twenty other Republicans voted to continue burdening taxpayers and the military with an ill-advised, unit-cohesion-damaging Obama-era policy to appease 0.004 percent of the American population, most of whom, like the GOP members who voted against the sensible amendment, will never serve.

In 2016, Dent and Costello were also among forty-three Republicans who helped pass a Democratic amendment to an unrelated bill, which, if enacted as amended, would have forced Obama’s unilaterally-imposed transgender rules on all fifty states and denied federal business to faith-based organizations and religious business owners who refused anatomical males access to women’s dressing rooms, locker rooms and bathrooms.

Dent and Costello sided with the socially-liberal Obama administration rather than with America’s faith-based groups, parents, our children and grandchildren.

People who oppose left-wing transgender policies aren’t bigots, haters or even unreasonable. Not long ago, they were aptly called “concerned citizens.”

Unlike the aforementioned twenty-four GOP congressmen and 190 voting Democrats, they may now be considered “concerned citizens for a rational, effective national defense.”

http://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/2017/07/26/gop-national-defense-disorder/513200001/