‘We Didn’t Choose This Fight’: House and Senate GOP Claw Back Military from Woke Biden Forces

“I can’t even believe we’re having to discuss this in polite company.” That was Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) response to the basket of woke policies Republicans are trying to strip out of the latest military funding bill. To the average person, they’re no-brainers: keeping men out of women’s showers, refusing to pay for abortion travel, ending taxpayer-funded sex changes. But debating these things is unavoidable under this White House, Gaetz laments. “They chose to use the military in a very tortured way … and we’re not going to authorize a [radical] military that works against the interest of our service members and their families.”

The House won big on that front earlier this month, passing a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that sticks it to the Pentagon’s radical priorities. Now, all eyes are on the Senate, where Republicans are fighting an uphill battle against Democrats to keep Joe Biden’s extremism out.

For now, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) seems more interested in using this second week on the NDAA to “hold together a bipartisan consensus … [and] strike a contrast with the GOP-led House …”

Easier said than done, Gaetz insists, since conservatives show no signs of buckling on these bright red cultural lines. “We didn’t choose this fight,” the Florida congressman argued. “I didn’t have to offer an amendment that women shouldn’t have to take showers with biological men, because I chose that fight. … I had to offer that amendment because women stationed [in my] military community said, ‘We are uncomfortable showering with someone who has male genitalia,’” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.”

And yet, Democrats like Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) still accuse the GOP of “hijack[ing] the bill to push their social agenda.” Hardly, Gaetz fired back. “We’re just trying to right the ship. We’re trying to get a course correction in place. … But that means they need to stop using taxpayer money to facilitate abortions through the military. That means that they shouldn’t be robbing money that we appropriate [for parents in the service with children who have disabilities] … for a gender hormone replacement therapy. So that is what we’re talking about. And I think most normal Americans would probably agree with us,” Gaetz said.

Perkins pointed out how often the Left projects onto their opposition, “especially the Biden administration. They stick a gun to your back, and you try to disarm them — and they call you the aggressor.”

Exactly, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) agreed. “The Democrats have been accusing our friends in the House of politicizing the military, which is rich, because the Biden administration is the one that has actually tried to politicize the military thoroughly over the last two and a half years with their witch hunt for non-existent extremists and paying for abortion tourism and for sex-change operations,” the Army veteran said on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Republicans are simply standing up for, as you rightly say, the opinion of the vast majority of the American people — to include normal Democrats around the country.”

Meanwhile, the abnormal contingent continues to push for its “unholy trinity,” Perkins pointed out. “The Biden administration is beholden to the Left’s agenda on abortion, transgenderism, and the so-called green policies [even though] … members of their base are against these policies, as we’ve seen from recent polling. But the Biden administration won’t drop these obsessions. It tells me there’s something much deeper going on [now that] this agenda even influences the annual spending bill to provide for our national defense.”

The priorities of the Biden Pentagon are so upside-down, Cotton said, that this is a legitimate scenario facing our troops right now: “Imagine two airmen at Little Rock Air Force Base. The first one walks into her commander and says, ‘Sir, I am pregnant. I want to take abortion leave.’ That commander has no choice but to sign her leave form for three weeks of paid leave — not weeks that come out of her annual 30 days of leave, but three weeks of uncharged paid leave. Plus her travel, plus her lodging, plus her meals. The next airman comes in and says, ‘Sir, a terrible thing has happened. My mother died unexpectedly last night. Can I have leave to go attend to her affairs and say goodbye at her funeral?’ The commander says, ‘Yes, you may, but you have to take it out of your 30 days of annual leave, and you’ll have to pay full freight for your own expenses.’ Just think about how distorted those priorities are. Yet that’s the current state of the Biden Department of Defense.”

Obviously, the Arkansas Republican pointed out, the “simplest way to solve all these problems is to win back the White House next year and have a secretary of Defense who understands that our troops need to be focused on training for and preparing to fight the next war … not using our military for left-wing social engineering.” Until then, he vowed, he’ll be actively battling to keep as much of the House bill intact in the final version as possible.

Americans will be cheering him on, FRC’s Quena Gonzalez believes, since they’re tired of Democrats “treating the military like their pet program, instead of the war-fighting, war-winning, war-averting instrument the founders intended.” Why? “Maybe they’re uncomfortable with violence except when it’s exercised against the unborn. Or maybe they can’t stand the thought that somewhere, someone may be saluting the flag instead of burning it, standing for the national anthem instead of kneeling for it, or committing their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States — instead of stretching it and shredding it in the furtherance of a humanistic utopia.”

“Any great institution that enjoys widespread support and resists liberal rot is a threat to the Left,” Gonzalez pointed out. “They want a military that destroys the unborn instead of protecting the weak, reduces people to identities based on their sexuality instead of promoting virtues of strength and sacrifice, and champions the leftward lurch of other social institutions — education, the media, and now Big Business — instead of promoting patriotism, honor, racial diversity, and family.”