Religious Right leaders are celebrating President Donald Trump’s policy-announcement-by-tweet this morning declaring a ban on transgender people serving in the U.S. military “in any capacity.” As Miranda noted earlier, re-instituting a ban that was lifted during the Obama administration has been one of the policy items on the Religious Right’s wish list for Trump and they had been lobbying for the change.
Liberty Counsel, which can generally be counted on to treat LGBTQ people with contempt, celebrated Trump’s decision as “making America safe again” while referring to “so-called transgender people.” It is an article of faith among many Religious Right activists that there is no such thing as transgender identity. The group’s release said that its Public Policy Director Jonathan Alexandre met with White House officials about the issue last Friday.
The American Family Association applauded Trump’s “courageous decision to end the usage of our military for social engineering and political correctness.”
Charisma’s Bob Eschliman gushed that Trump had “shattered his predecessor’s grand social experiment in the U.S. military.”
The Family Research Council’s Robert Maginnis praised the “common sense” decision and took a rhetorical shot at the Obama administration for forcing the military to go down a path of “political correctness.”
Former military chaplain and former Colorado officeholder Gordon Klingenschmitt said “thank God” for the ban on transgender people serving in the military but complained in an email about 24 Republican House members who joined all House Democrats last week to defeat an amendment that would have banned the use of taxpayer funds on medical treatments associated with gender transition.
Anti-gay extremist Theodore Shoebat found in Trump’s announcement yet another opportunity to express his belief that gay people should be exterminated: “While this is great news, what really needs to be done is the death penalty for sodomites.”
The next demand? Right-wing pundit Matt Barber is clear: “Prohibit all open sexual deviancy in the ranks of the armed forces.” Of course he had more to say:
The military is no place for extremist San Francisco-style socio-political activism. Such social engineering destroys national security, troop morale and unit cohesion. It also violates natural law, settled science, and God's moral law. President Trump did the right thing today by prohibiting those suffering from the gender dysphoria mental disorder.
AFA’s One News Now declared the Trump tweets “Today’s Top Story” and reprinted glowing responses from a handful of Religious Right leaders, while offering a “poll” that asks for reaction to the Trump ban; the poll gives readers five different ways to say “Yay!” but no way to register disapproval:
Trump’s announcement came on the anniversary of President Harry Truman’s executive order ending racial segregation in the military.
