OPINION:
In September 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference, declaring “Peace for our time.” Appeasement was the official name given to the British prime minister’s response to German aggression.
Chamberlain was widely touted for his efforts as a strategic genius who had stemmed the tide of der Führer’s expansionist aims. His political checkmate of Hitler was greeted with jubilation by most of the British Parliament and the media intelligentsia.
Winston Churchill stood nearly alone in opposition. In his now famous speech from the House of Commons, he declared Mr. Chamberlain’s leadership to be naive at best and a diplomatic disaster in the extreme. “I will, therefore, begin,” he bellowed, “by saying the most unpopular and most unwelcome thing; [Something] everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.”
In less than a year, the Nazis invaded Poland, World War II began, and Chamberlain went down in history more as a fool than a statesman worthy of respect.
This past Thursday, the Oklahoma House of Representatives and the Oklahoma Senate did their absolute best to ignore these lessons of history. It’s as if our GOP leaders have never heard of Churchill’s wisdom or Chamberlain’s mistakes. Despite having a Republican supermajority in both chambers of legislative government, our elected brain trust in the “reddest of red states” just voted to appease rather than stop the cultural Übermensch and their march to groom and butcher Oklahoma’s children.
When confronted with the fact that the University of Oklahoma Children’s Hospital explicitly says on its website that it promotes “gender-affirming treatment that can include pausing puberty; managing gender-affirming hormone therapy; helping find surgeons who perform gender-affirming surgeries, and assisting with legal name or gender marker changes,” Oklahoma’s lawmakers decided that the best thing to do was to give an additional $39.4 million to the hospital in question.
How did our Sooner State’s “public servants” justify this? Well, they scolded the University of Oklahoma’s Hospital Authority, gave them a “timeout,” and told them they were very, very bad. They then demanded that the hospital never ever do these terrible things again. The administration and doctors of OU’s Reichstag hung their heads in shame, promised to behave, and then accepted their “punishment” of adding nearly $40 million to their war chest.
At this point in the story, you might rightly ask: Now that they are $40 million to the good, what is to stop the Children’s Hospital from continuing their child abuse by simply referring their victims to other clinics and hospitals across the state? The answer is, nothing. In other words, they can and will continue to aid and abet every nefarious service they mention on their website and enjoy an additional $40 million for doing so.
And what makes this façade all the more galling is that this all took place while Oklahoma’s Senate president pro tem, Greg Treat, and speaker of the House, Charles McCall, refused to hear two bills (House Bill 3240 and Senate Bill 676) that would have solved all this nonsense and sleight of hand. Both of these bills would have made it “unlawful in the State of Oklahoma for any health care professional to intentionally perform gender reassignment medical treatment on a person under the age of twenty-one,” and both of these bills were quashed by Treat and McCall, respectively. All debate was declared verboten.
A Churchillian conservative would demand the passage of these laws as a predicate to any further funding of the hospitals defying the ideals these Republican leaders purportedly hold. Anything short of such legislation is little more than naive (or disingenuous) appeasement. It does nothing but guarantee a future attack and begs for death by a thousand cuts.
Until it is illegal in Oklahoma to perform any gender-altering therapy or surgery on minors, no money should be given to these schools and hospitals. The “most unpopular and most unwelcome thing; [Something] everybody would like to ignore” is this: Until such a law exists, all funds allocated are little more than political appeasement that will lead to “total and unmitigated defeat.”
Or, as one of my Facebook friends says, “This is a snow job to give them cover when they get home. This was poison money. And our Republican leaders knowingly drank it. Conservatives should be defunding the mutilation of body, mind, and soul that they are foisting on our kids. The reddest state in the union - my arse.”
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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