Opinion| In some breaking news, President Donald Trump’s proposal to ban transgenders from joining the United States military has passed the top United States court.
Fox5 San Diego reports:
The Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump’s transgender military ban to go into effect on Tuesday, dealing a blow to LGBT activists who call the ban cruel and irrational.
The Justices did not rule on the merits of the case, but will allow the ban to go forward while the lower courts work through it.
The four liberal justices on the Court objected to allowing the ban to go into effect.
Trump first announced the policy on Twitter in July of 2017. It was later officially released by James Mattis, who was Secretary of Defense at the time. The policy blocks any individual who has been diagnosed with a condition known as “gender dysphoria” from enrolling and serving in our country’s military with very limited exceptions. The policy also “specifies that individuals without the condition can serve, but only if they do so according to the sex they were assigned at birth,” according to Fox5 San Diego.
The Trump administration took home a win with the court’s decision to pass the policy. Government attorneys were hoping that the Court would take up the case, however they also pushed for the ban to be put into place while the case is examined by lower level courts.
Fox5 San Diego reports, “By the government’s own numbers in 2016, there were approximately 8,980 Service members that identify as transgender. During the Obama administration, 937 members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and began or completed their transition.”
The New York Times reports:
The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s five conservative members in the majority and its four liberal members in dissent.
The administration had also asked the justices to hear immediate appeals from trial court rulings blocking the policy. The court turned down those requests without comment.
Challenges to the policy have had mixed success in the lower courts. Trial judges around the nation issued injunctions blocking it, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, is expected to rule soon on whether to affirm one of them.
On Jan. 4, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated a third injunction, that one issued by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a federal trial judge in Washington. The appeals court said its ruling was “not a final determination on the merits.” But it handed the administration at least a provisional victory.
The Supreme Court granted stays of two other injunctions, issued by Federal District Court judges in California and Washington State, both in the Ninth Circuit.