Q Toon: The Eyes of Texas

Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that he wants to see the elimination of current restrictions against transgendered troops serving in the U.S. military. Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Brad Carson is leading the group working on the practicalities and logistics of the policy change.

“At my direction," Carter said, "the working group will start with the presumption that transgender persons can serve openly without adverse impact on military effectiveness and readiness, unless and except where objective, practical impediments are identified.”

I expected the Republican Party to jump immediately into its standard Argument Clinic mode, but astonishingly, not all the response has been negative. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, for example, told Yahoo! News that “ …if you can accommodate people who are transgendered and deal with making sure the military’s comfortable with this and making sure that the overriding principle ought to be how do we create the highest morale for the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen … and if you can accommodate those two concerns, then fine.”

That measured reaction must be why he's running well behind Donald Trump.

The reaction of the red state, Knee-jerk Party of No, confederate flag-waving, Tea Partisan, Obama-hatin', God-Guns-and-Not-Necessarily-In-That-Order crowd is probably something more like this:

If not, it probably will be soon, now that I've put this idea out on the internets for them. If you're still puzzled by Texans' sudden suspicion of the United States military, this Gromer Jeffers column in the Dallas Morning News attempts to explain it.