Somewhat offthread…but related.

President Obama has appointed a well qualified transgendered woman named Amanda Simpson to a position in the Commerce Department to deal with transfers of military technology overseas (She has degrees in business, engineering and physics, is a test pilot and instructor pilot and is a missile technology expert with Raytheon with 30 years in the aerospace field)

myfoxatlanta.com

The usual suspects on the religious right have gone apeshit.

“Is there going to be a transgender quota now in the Obama administration?” asked Peter LaBarbera, president of the anti-gay group Americans for Truth. “How far does this politics of gay and transgender activism go? Clearly this is an administration that is pandering to the gay lobby.”

Matt Barber, associate dean at Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University, said the appointment “boggles the mind” and said that while African-Americans might deserve special treatment, transgender people don’t.
“This isn’t like appointing an African-American in order to try to provide diversity and right some kind of discriminatory wrong,” he said. “This is about political correctness.”

David Brody at the Christian Broadcasting Network also predicted a right-wing backlash and argued that the right thing to do would be to not hire transsexuals, for that reason: “The transgender thing doesn’t play well with millions of conservative Evangelicals. … I understand President Obama won’t be after die hard conservative Evangelicals in 2012 but let’s remember that moves like this don’t play well with the million of conservative Independent voters and Catholics who will be up for grabs again in 2012 as well.”

huffingtonpost.com

Nice. Apparantly, if I get a job, I am now a “Quota Queen” according to fundies.

And people wonder why I have disdain for the new Christianist GOP…