While the president’s incoherent foreign policy continues to facilitate the unraveling of the Middle East and the empowerment of America’s most threatening enemies, his administration continues to successfully drive its ideological agenda forward in the military. On Wednesday, the Pentagon held its fifth annual LGBT pride ceremony, celebrating the administration’s progress and demanding more changes to military policy to further LGBT interests.
The administration has devoted immense energy and resources to its progressive “equality” push, but despite all the effort to cater to the LGBT community, as the Washington Post notes, many activists are growing “increasingly frustrated” by things not changing fast enough.
Most of that frustration stems from the continued delay on the report ordered by Defense Secretary Ash Carter last year that is seeking to prove that open transgenderism does not negatively impact service performance. Despite not having begun the study at the time to change the military’s policies in regard to transgenderism, Carter told his team last July to proceed with the “presumption” that transgenders can openly serve “without adverse impact on military effectiveness and readiness, unless and except where objective, practical impediments are identified.”
The report was supposed to be completed five months ago, but so far there have been no official announcements from the department.
Military policy has considered transgender individuals unfit to serve and qualified for honorable discharge if diagnosed with a range of “psychosexual conditions.” LGBT activists want transgenders to be able to serve openly, while opponents cite concerns about combat effectiveness and financial and resource implications.
While Carter abruptly stopped discharging transgender service members last year, other major policy questions are still unresolved, including rules for bathroom and locker usage, uniforms, and grooming, the length of the wait time after someone has “transitioned” to join the military, and, perhaps most controversial, whether or not the military will pay for the costly hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery involved in transitioning.
Though he didn’t personally attend the event Wednesday, Carter did issue a statement celebrating LGBT service members. “Throughout our history, brave LGBT soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsmen and Marines have served and fought for our nation. Their readiness and willingness to serve has made our military stronger and our nation safer,” he said.
A Pentagon spokesman reassured activists earlier this week that there has been “progress in terms of trying to consider how to move forward here and resolve this issue in the fashion that [Sec. Carter] first outlined several months ago.”