Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. STEUBE. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Chair, I rise today in support of my amendment that would restrict radical gender ideology and pornographic content from entering the libraries and classrooms of schools operated by the Department of Defense.

These morally corrupting materials have no place in an educational setting and could seriously harm the educational and psychological development of school children belonging to our servicemembers.

Oftentimes, DOD schools are the only option that servicemembers have to educate their children, and we must ensure they have the resources to prepare them for success in their future careers and society.

Yet, radical leftists desire to use schools as a tool to indoctrinate our children as soon as they enter kindergarten. I wish they were all just theoretical, but there exists a litany of examples of inappropriate and pornographic material that is available in DOD schools.

Much of the material is far too graphic for me to read verbatim here on the House floor, but one example includes the book ``Gender Queer,'' which includes explicit imagery of explicit acts.

In some DOD middle schools, young children are able to access a book called ``Middle School's a Drag,'' which is a story about a 12-year-old boy who starts a talent agency for child drag queen performers.

In elementary school libraries, students can read many books about radical gender ideology, like ``When Aidan Became a Brother,'' which tells the story of a girl who believes she is a transgender boy.

This material has no place in our schools, and Congress has the power to put a stop to it in DOD schools. The DOD school system serves over 66,000 children across the world, and we owe it to our servicemembers to provide their children with a topnotch education. That education should include lessons about reading, writing, and arithmetic, not explicit pornography and radical transgender propaganda.

Madam Chair, I encourage my colleagues to join me in protecting the children entrusted to DOD schools by our men and women in uniform.

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Mr. STEUBE. Madam Chair, these decisions are not best left to educators. In my opinion, it is best left to the parents to decide how they want to teach their kids.

Our schools should be about teaching for the success of our children in mathematics and arithmetic and writing, not in gender ideology and pornography. What is unwelcome intrusion is teaching our kids pornography and transgender ideology.
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Mr. STEUBE. I just think that the purpose, especially having been a military servicemember and been on bases that have schools for our children, one of which was actually in Hawaii when I served at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, the purpose of our DOD institutions and the education that our kids are getting there should not involve gender ideology, transgender propaganda, and radical sexualized ideology that just, quite frankly, shouldn't be taught to elementary school kids or middle school kids.

Middle school children have access to some of these things that are very explicit pornography in these types of books. My belief is that our education system should be focused on teaching our children the types of things to make them successful as students, not sexual content.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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