Heritage Foundation praises effort to ban transgender healthcare for military families
In a statement released Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation praised House Republicans’ military spending bill, including the provision added by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that would ban gender-affirming healthcare interventions for the children of U.S.
service members. Victoria Coates, vice president of the organization’s Kathyrn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by the U.S.
House Rules Committee along party lines on Monday, marks an “important step toward a defense budget that flows from strategy and directs DOD to become as lethal as possible to protect the national security of Americans.” “The bill authorizes resources for DOD at the border, retains the House’s ban on corrosive race-based policies, eliminates the Senate’s provision to draft our daughters, prohibits transgender surgeries for minors under TRICARE, supports military construction in the Indo-Pacific and shipbuilding, including a third Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, and incremental funding for a second Virginia-class submarine,” Coates said. “These policies in this bill, combined with new military leadership, will make America stronger.” In April 2022, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a comprehensive 920-page governing blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term that proposes radical reforms to imbue the federal government with “biblical principles” and advance a Christian nationalist agenda, including by stripping rights away from LGBTQ Americans while abandoning efforts to promote equality for sexual and gender minorities abroad. “The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the authors explain on page four, beginning “with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender
