'HUGE VICTORY': Drag Show at Air Force Base Axed After Tipoff from Rep. Matt Gaetz
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, claimed “HUGE VICTORY” over wokeness in the U.S. military.
At Gaetz’s prompting, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered officials at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to cancel a drag queen event planned for June 1, NBC reported.
The event was scheduled to coincide with the opening of what the Biden administration has called “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI+) Pride Month.”
“HUGE VICTORY,” Gaetz posted on Twitter. “The Department of Defense has CANCELED a scheduled ‘child-friendly’ drag show after I demanded answers from @SecDef Austin and General Milley!
“Drag shows should not be taking place on military installations with taxpayer dollars PERIOD!”
HUGE VICTORY: The Department of Defense has CANCELED a scheduled “child-friendly” drag show after I demanded answers from @SecDef Austin and General Milley!
Drag shows should not be taking place on military installations with taxpayer dollars PERIOD!
READ:… https://t.co/YDByQihQod pic.twitter.com/vnJiuFlh2z
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) May 31, 2023
Gaetz’s announcement comes with the usual mixture of both heartening and disheartening news.
On the positive side, he prevented an abomination from occurring at taxpayer expense on a U.S. Air Force base.
At the same time, however, one is left to wonder why U.S. military officials would sanction such an event in the first place.
Worse yet, this would not have been the U.S. military’s first such offense. In a letter addressed jointly to Austin and Milley, Gaetz identified five other instances in which military officials, either Air Force or Navy, have promoted drag queen events at taxpayer expense.
“I find it completely unacceptable that DoD is using taxpayer dollars to fund DEI programs that are divisive in nature,” Gaetz wrote.
The congressman’s letter exposes the shocking depths to which the U.S. military has descended. On July 30, 2022, for instance, officials at Joint Base Langley-Eustis hosted a “kid-friendly” drag event.
Below each documented instance identified in the letter, Gaetz posed a series of questions to Austin and Milley, one of which commands special attention: “Does the DoD feel it’s appropriate for children to attend a sexualized drag performance?”
To put it in terms that even woke military officials might comprehend, Gaetz’s question draws an ineradicable line in the sand. Resistance to LGBT fanaticism stems not from hatred, but from the determination to insulate children against all forms of adult sexual expression.
This does not mean that conservatives regard all LGBT adult behavior as benign, but the question at hand has nothing to do with what consenting adults, for whatever reasons they might conjure, choose to do in private.
The question here is why U.S. military officials promote any drag shows, let alone “kid-friendly” drag shows, at public expense.
For decades, conservatives have comforted themselves with belief in the U.S. military as an oasis of sanity in a desert of social declension. Though plagued by the same folly and sin that characterizes all human institutions, the armed forces seemed a comparative bastion of rock-solid values.
As individuals, the men and women of the U.S. military have always appeared to exemplify the things for which, in our highest moments of idealism, we believe we are asking them to fight.
Historically speaking, however, militaries as institutions have an unimpressive record of resisting fanatical movements that infect their societies. At the risk of citing an overused example, it is worth noting that Adolf Hitler first courted the once-proud German officer corps and then effectively neutered the German Wehrmacht (Army), transforming it into a submissive agent of his National Socialist revolution.
Every mention of Hitler, at least on the conservative side, is not meant to cast one’s political adversaries as embryonic Nazis. What matters here is that an officer corps, notwithstanding long-established traditions to the contrary, sometimes will submit with surprising meekness to an aggressive social revolution.
This is not to suggest that anything in the nature of military life necessarily lends itself to such abject surrender.
It does mean, however, that nothing in the nature of military life necessarily ensures that its officers will not succumb to whatever madness happens to be driving civilian fanatics at any given moment.
Wokeness, which the U.S. military has shamefully abetted, bears all the marks of the fanatical movements that brought the world to ruin in the 20th century.
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