Chip Roy: “I will be brief in the interest of moving things along. The only thing I would note is, with respect to the difference…”

“I will be brief in the interest of moving things along. The only thing I would note is, with respect to the difference, for example, of talking about Christmas trees and celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and putting up a Pride flag, I would say those things are different. I would also note that there have been problems at the Department of Defense with people expressing their faith. In fact, there are Christians who are being limited in their ability to have Christian displays in their offices, and we had to have groups like First Liberty go litigate it in court in order to defend their right to be able to display said Christian symbols and statements in their office cubicle. This is what is going on at the Department of Defense, and people don't understand it. I think this is a commonsense effort to refocus our military on the mission to which it should be focused. Acknowledging that we are a diverse community is great, but the Department of Defense can acknowledge that diversity and bring people together to carry out the mission without perpetuating essentially social engineering at the Department of Defense. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time. Ms. McCOLLUM. Mr. Chair, I will close in just a minute. I mentioned a friend. I had several friends in high school--I graduated in 1972--who were gay. They hid the fact that they were. They served when recruitment was kind of down after the Vietnam war.…”