The officer joked about the US First Lady’s tweet lamenting the loss of a right for “women” following the Supreme Court’s decree on abortion.
We don’t make fun of the first lady in the United States that way. The US military has suspended its former communications chief Gary Volesky, a retired general, after a derisive response to a tweet from Jill Biden. She deplored, on June 24, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus allowing every state to ban abortion. “For almost 50 years, women have had the right to decide for themselves about their bodieswrote the first lady. Today this right has been stolen from us“.
The sarcastic response from the three-star general flared up. “Glad to see you finally know what a woman is“, retorted Gary Volesky in a since deleted tweet, but revealed on Saturday by the daily USA Today. Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith told the washington post that the retired military officer, “pending the outcome of the investigationopened by the command, was suspended from his training contract within the army.
Asked by the American press, the White House did not comment. According to the American press, the tweet of the officer, hired by the Pentagon as an expert, is a breach of the reserve required of all retired civil servants and generals, and an unwelcome intrusion “in partisan politics“.
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Allusion to the transgender issue
What did the officer mean by his tweet? The American press sees it as a reference to an exchange last March between Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and Ketanji Brown Jackson, new Supreme Court justice, during the hearing in the House of Representatives to confirm his appointment. The elected summoned the future judge to define the word “womenin reference to transgender rights. “I can’t. Not in this context“, replied Marsha Jackson, justifying herself by recalling that she was “not a biologist“. “The meaning of the word “woman” is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?“, had insisted the representative to the Republican Party, without obtaining more answers.
Among the many reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion, some radical feminists in the United States have deplored the use of the term “womento talk about people affected by restrictions on abortion. Trans-exclusive radical feminists (TERF), in particular, consider this term discriminatory, and prefer gender-inclusive language to it.
It’s not the first time the 60-year-old star general, who served in the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, has let his political views shine through on Twitter. In July 2021, this former army spokesperson responded to Representative Liz Cheney who announced that she wanted to sit on the select committee responsible for investigating the attack on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. “Our oath to the Constitution must be above partisan politics“Wrote the elected Republican of the House of Representatives. What Gary Volesky had retorted: “It’s a matter of partisan politics“.
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