Military experts believe Congress needs to intervene in the military’s carried away woke agenda “before it’s too late.” Captain Thomas Wheatley, an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the Daily Caller News Foundation the military could seek to formally punish service members for refusing to use another service member’s preferred pronouns under existing policy.
The military “is right to want to protect the rights and welfare of its transgender service members. But it owes the same protection to those who share a different perspective on the issue, especially when that perspective is a deep-seated expression of personal conscience,” Wheatley told the DCNF.
None of the military’s rules explicitly prohibit so-called “misgendering,” when someone uses pronouns to describe a transgender person which do not correspond to the person’s new gender identity, Wheatley explained. However, existing guidance implies that using pronouns rejected by another person violates Military Equal Opportunity (MEO) regulations against sex-based harassment and discrimination.
The DCNF reports:
A 2020 Equal Opportunity law opened the door for commanders to subject someone who refuses to affirm a transgender servicemember’s so-called gender identity to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for charges related to harassment, Capt. Thomas Wheatley, an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Such a move would likely infringe on a servicemember’s constitutional rights to uphold their conscience, but it might not prevent leaders from employing more subtle ways of disciplining service members.
Service members could conceivably be court-martialed for “refusing to use another person’s self-identified pronouns, even when their refusal stems from principled religious conviction,” Wheatley told the DCNF. “This law applies to service members at all times and in all locations, even when they’re off duty and in the privacy of their off-post residence.”
The UCMJ also prohibits “conduct unbecoming of an officer” under Article 133 and activity that could be seen to discredit the military institution under Article 134 — the same article the military uses to prosecute child pornographers and other acts of sexual deviance, he explained.
“Is it now ‘unbecoming’ and incompatible with service as a commissioned officer to openly hold sincere religious convictions surrounding the act of creation and the nature of human sex?” Wheatley asked.
Wheatley said his interest in the issue was sparked four years ago, when the Army updated its MEO policy stating “violations of MEO and Harassment Prevention and Response policies may result in disciplinary action under the UCMJ.”
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