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You’ll just love Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest antics

You’ll just love Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest antics

Last updated on: October 1, 2023 at 10:39 am by Kathryn Shihadah

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You’ll just love Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest antics 2023-10-01T10:39:06-04:00 Kathryn Shihadah

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As part of the tug-of-war that comes with defense spending, our favorite cartoon characters – Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene – managed to make enough noise to remind us just how ridiculous the far-right can be. At the same time, they insulted thousands of American soldiers and signaled loyalty to white supremacists.

All in all, just another ordinary day on Capitol Hill.

Their nonsense took place on Wednesday and Thursday – hours before the US budget deadline – in an attempt to pressure Congress into tacking extremist amendments onto the budget just before a government shutdown.

Late Saturday night, Congress passed a temporary funding bill – one that does not include Lauren and Marge’s amendments – but the final budget will be passed eventually, and the power couple’s bigotry will be part of America’s FY 2024 policy.

Lauren can’t sit still

Just two weeks after her Beetlejuice disgrace, Rep. Lauren Boebert reapplied her lipstick, straightened her miniskirt, and climbed back onto her soapbox. First order of business: insult a high ranking member of the Department of Defense, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness Shawn Skelly. Boebert demanded an amendment to the defense spending bill that would essentially fire the assistant secretary. Here’s how she began:

“Mr. Skelly is failing at his job…”

Here’s why that’s insulting: Assistant Secretary Skelly is a woman. Take a moment to let that sink in.

Shawn Skelly is a trans woman, and this is something that Lauren Boebert can not abide.

Here are some lowlights from Boebert’s speech on the House floor (emphasis added):

On his [Skelly’s] watch, the army missed their recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers…[Other branches also fell short]…

Mr. Skelly played an instrumental role in the disastrous and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed 13 of America’s finest…

This delusional man, thinking he is a woman, embodies and espouses the wokism that causes significant harm to our military readiness and troop morale.

The military shouldn’t be focused on this woke agenda…

With Mr. Skelly at the helm of readiness, these misguided policy pursuits will continue to be at the forefront of DOD’s priorities.

Sure, if you want to call Mr. Skelly a her, his chromosomes are still xy. We trust science over here rather than delusion and playing dress-up…

Ms. Boebert was reading from a script. That means she made a deliberate decision to call Ms. Skelly a “delusional man” who is “playing dress-up.” This is a high-level, public attempt to humiliate a fellow human being – by a “Christian.”

Basically, Lauren Boebert (who has had a vendetta against LGBTQ people since she arrived in Washington) accused Shawn Skelly of forcing the American military to focus on the “trans agenda” (whatever that is) rather than on readiness to fight.

This trans agenda was apparently the cause of Skelly’s “failure” to recruit enough soldiers, and to get everyone out of Afghanistan safely.

Boebert was so fixated on Shawn Skelly’s sexual orientation that she forgot to do a little research before opening her mouth. If she had taken a minute to Google “US army recruitment goal,” she would have learned that “wokism” (whatever that is) is not the reason for the armed forces’ failure to reach their recruitment goals.

According to Military.com, the main reason for low recruitment is that less than a quarter of 17- to 24-year-olds qualify for service – many of them are either too overweight, or fail the “SAT-style entrance exam.” That is to say, our military can’t recruit enough soldiers because too many young Americans are fat and/or uneducated.

(The possibility that maybe our entire military is bloated, and America has its empire-minded nose in business all over the world…is a subject for another day.)

As for Afghanistan, there is plenty of blame to go around – including Trump himself. And even a non-military person (with a brain) can understand that a withdrawal effort like that is full of unknowns, booby traps, and enemy deceptions.

Lauren Boebert’s rant wasn’t just insulting to one trans woman. A 2014 study revealed that “[t]he American military employs more transgender people than any other organization in the world: around 15,500…more than 6,000 of whom are on active duty.” That is a lot of people to call “delusional” and “playing dress-up” (and many of them carry guns)!

Lauren’s comment about Republicans “trusting science” is too ludicrous to even address.

(It’s also striking that Lauren seems to know intimate details about Shawn Skelly better than Shawn Skelly does.)

It appears that the military is handling LTBTQ matters fairly well – a handbook on the transgender issue has been around for seven years already. The dust has settled. It’s Boebert and her ilk that are “focused” on sexual orientation.

Her amendment to lower Skelly’s salary to one dollar did not pass.

Rep. Boebert also proposed an amendment aimed at prohibiting US Department of Agriculture (USDA) from using federal funds on materials that support its LGBTQ employees.

That amendment passed.

Is Lauren Boebert trying to win back far-right votes that she lost when she got caught compromising her Christian morals, and then lied about it? Or is she simply a bigot?

(Commercial: if you question “business as usual” in Christianity – or want to question it – subscribe to my newsletter, and we can journey together!)

READ: Newsflash: Lauren Boebert does not resemble Jesus

And then there’s Marge

Marjorie Taylor Greene took a page from Lauren Boebert’s playbook, calling for an amendment to the defense spending bill to reduce the salary of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin – the first African American defense secretary in history – to one dollar.

If she was pretending to trim the defense budget, she failed. Austin’s salary cut amounts to .00003 percent of the proposed $886 billion budget. She did it because he’s Black.

Like Boebert, Taylor Green complained about the outcome of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the low military recruitment numbers. She also added that under Secretary Austin, 8,000 troops were let go for refusing the Covid vaccine.

“As a matter of fact, he’s destroying our military!” she stated.

Taylor Greene then called on fellow Republican Derrick Van Orden – who had participated in the January 6th insurrection – to speak about the defense spending amendment. He blamed Secretary Austin for the high active duty and veteran suicide rate.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment passed.

Washington can tolerate a few crackpots. But Georgia’s 14th congressional district and Colorado’s 3rd need to unseat these women. Christians of these districts need to make sure it happens. They are embarrassing everyone who bears the name of Christian. And it’s not just about their defense spending shenanigans – that’s just the latest in a long string of stunts.

Let’s fire them.

(If you are energized by challenges to the evangelical status quo like this, please subscribe to my newsletter! If you would like to comment on this post, please pop over to my Facebook page. All of my posts are there and open to constructive comment! I welcome your thoughts.)

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FEATURED IMAGES: “Marjorie Taylor Greene (52251855726)” by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; “Lauren Boebert” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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About Kathryn Shihadah

I was raised as a conservative Christian, and was perfectly content to stay that way – until the day my stable, predictable world was rocked. A curtain was pulled back on conservative Christianity, and instead of ignoring the ugliness I saw, I confronted it. I began to ask questions I never thought I’d ask, and found answers I’d never expected. Old things began to fall away, and – behold! – the new me has come. What a gift to be a new, still-evolving creation. I found out that it’s better to look at the world through Progressive Lenses, with Grace-Colored Glasses. You can read more about the author here.

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