Family Research Council Tony Perkins, in an apparent reference to policy changes allow openly gay and transgender people to serve in the U.S. military, said yesterday that the military is facing recruiting challenges because “they’ve turned it into a parade that looks like the bar scene in Star Wars.”
Perkins, hosting his daily “Washington Watch” radio program, took a call from a listener who suggested that the U.S. should ban immigration from “the 57 Arabic nations” in order to keep out “jihadi-ists.”
While Perkins didn’t address the caller’s point about banning immigrants from “Arabic nations,” he agreed that “legal immigration is a big problem” because “people that have come in from Muslim countries” may “threaten our country from within.”
Perkins then proceeded to go down the rabbit hole, citing the shooting at a military recruitment center in Tennessee by a U.S. citizen who came to the country when he was six years old to claim that Muslim immigrants have become such a threat that the government is now “turning America into a police state.” This led Perkins to attack the Navy over a rumor, which the Navy has denied, that it plans prosecute the lieutenant commander who fired his personal firearm at the Chattanooga shooter.
Not done yet, Perkins then sounded off about the military missing its annual recruiting goal: “Surprise, surprise. They’ve destroyed religious freedom in our military, they’ve turned it into a parade that looks like the bar scene in Star Wars and they are wondering why they can’t recruit people. It’s beyond words.”
Back in 2010, shortly before the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for gay and lesbian service members was repealed, Perkins claimed that militaries that allow gay people to serve openly like Israel and the U.K. are “ones that participate in parades, they don’t fight wars to keep the nation and the world free.”
