Maga Political Priorities
Floor Speech
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Mr. POCAN. Madam Speaker, you have probably heard the Republican majority tell you they are laser focused on reducing costs for the average American by lowering inflation. You have likely heard about their alleged quest for a smaller, less-intrusive government. Yup, I have heard them, too.
Well, this week in Congress clearly shows they didn't mean any of that. In fact, quite the opposite.
Just yesterday, Republicans showed their real priorities--partisan ultra-MAGA political priorities--by considering a trans and intersex sports ban as their opening salvo in their efforts to undermine the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
Here are the facts. Young people participate in sports to be part of a team, learn sportsmanship, and challenge themselves. It is about friendships and learning to work together as a team. The GOP sports ban seeks to strip trans girls of all ages of these opportunities.
Look, there are real, pressing problems impacting women's and girls' sports, including sexual harassment and assault, lack of equal resources, and pay inequality. These are real issues that the GOP majority is ignoring.
There are pressing problems facing kids of our Nation, including nearly 50,000 gun deaths a year, including more than 4,700 that involve kids; but not a peep from the Republicans in Congress about something that is actually killing children.
Rather than addressing any of these issues, anti-equality politicians on the Committee on Education and the Workforce spent their first legislative markup this session targeting the few trans girls and women who participate in school sports.
When it comes to protecting women's sports, we should look to leading women's sports and gender justice organizations like the Women's Sports Foundation and the National Women's Law Center. Both organizations, as well as leading women athletes, support transgender inclusion in sports.
Major athletic bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and NCAA have guidelines for the participation of transgender athletes, and these bodies reject the type of systematic exclusion of transgender people from sports that anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are pushing.
This isn't about a real problem in this Nation. This is part of a larger coordinated attack against transgender people and the larger LGBTQ+ population. We have seen hundreds of anti-equality bills, many specifically targeting transgender people introduced in States across the country this year.
Unfortunately, this is about building the personal brand of some extreme rightwing politicians, people who fundraise from and appeal to a small subset of their political base, rather than about a real problem in this country.
These bullying politicians will endanger the lives of trans kids for their own political purposes, seemingly with the support of GOP leadership.
I guess we shouldn't be surprised. Not one Republican in leadership called out the comments last week by a conservative speaker at the CPAC conference who called for the eradication of transgender people.
This isn't about sports. This is about attacking trans and LGBTQ+ kids and the extreme MAGA politics of that issue, not the substance of just letting kids play. That is heartless and cruel.
We will fight these attacks hard. We will call out this dangerous demagoguery, and we will make sure the public sees it for what it is-- raw, swampy politics, as usual, of the worst kind.
There will be few pages assigned to future chapters of ``Profiles in Courage'' for the politicians that bully kids for their own gain. This week, that is exactly what we saw from the majority party in Congress, and we will expose this opportunistic bullying.
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