I wish I could say that I’m surprised by this but really … isn’t this inevitable all across the government? In fact, it’s already here:
The US Department of Veterans Affairs has enthusiastically joined Donald Trump’s war on DEI – demanding that staffers report colleagues who engage in diversity initiatives, banning LGBTQ+ pride flags from VA hospitals and shuttering an office investigating why Black veterans are more likely to have their mental health disability claims rejected.
Last week, the VA secretary, Doug Collins, tweeted that “VA is now squarely focused on Veterans – not out-of-touch, woke causes such as DEI and gender dysphoria treatments.”
Collins’s pronouncement comes as he faces tough questions from US Senate and House members in the wake of a Guardian report that the agency had quietly removed language from its hospital bylaws that explicitly barred discrimination based on patients’ marital status or political views.
Seventy House members wrote to express “profound alarm” that doctors and other VA medical providers “will now be able to refuse treatment” based on veterans’ political views or whether they are unmarried, widowed or part of a same-sex couple.
Collins and his agency have pushed back with a series of puzzling statements, saying the bylaw changes were merely a “formality” and were required by a Trump anti-transgender executive order banning “gender ideology extremism” – even though the Trump order says nothing about marital status or political affiliations.
Especially novel – given the VA and the Trump administration’s adamant anti-DEI stance – was the agency’s argument that the bylaw changes did not matter because unmarried or politically active patients would still be protected by a 2013 Obama administration DEI directive.
Of course they are targeting people for their political views. That’s what the DEI anti-trans movement is really all about. Protesters, tourists, government employees are already in the cross hairs as well as, obviously, legal immigrants who have been arrested for their political views about Israel.
I mean, they’re administering loyalty oaths to FBI agents. It. Is. Happening.