President Obama Wednesday night said U.S. service members fight so that people like the 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick can express their views and take a knew during the national anthem to make a point.
“We fight sometimes so that people can do things we can disagree with — but that’s what freedom means in this country,” Obama told a CNN town hall on military issues at Ft. Lee, Va.
The president took a question asking what he thinks about Kaepernick and other NFL players’ decision to take a knee during the national anthem before their football games in order to protest the fatal shootings of black men by police.
“As I’ve said before I believe that us honoring our flag and our anthem is part of what binds us together as a nation,” he said. “I think that for me, for my family, for those who work in the White House, we recognize what it means not only for us, but what it means for the men and women fighting on our behalf.”
At the same time, he said, “I’m also always trying to remind folks that part of what makes this country special is that we respect people’s rights to have a difference of opinion and to make difficult decisions about how they want to express different concerns.”
In the wide-ranging town hall meeting with members of the nation’s military, the president covered several controversial issues. A widow of a veteran who died of cancer after being misdiagnosed at a Veteran Affairs hospital wanted to know why that doctor was still working at the hospital and there wasn’t more accountability for some employees.
While Obama said that a lot of people have been fired and the VA has worked hard to improve wait times, he acknowledged that there is no way to “sugarcoat” the significant problems that “have accumulated over decades” that are being made worse by the flood of veterans coming home from Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots.
“I don’t want to say that we are in any way where we need to be,” he said. “We fired a lot of people. You can bet I will find out after this meeting” about the doctor in question.
Obama also described the VA bureaucracy as a big “ocean liner” that is hard to change course.
Another soldier pressed Obama on whether the gains he helped make in Afghanistan would remain and not be lost like those in Iraq.
He faced another question about whether his administration’s decision to allow women in combat would not harm the overall mission or reduce evacuation times from ambushes or other hot situations, as some reports have shown.
He told the woman service member who asked him the question that he is not motivated by “political correctness” but instead by a desire that women who “can do the job, should get the job.”
“Keep in mind … there are a lot of jobs in combat that don’t involve you going door-to-door in Fallujah,” he said. “It may not involve how many pull-ups you can do. It might involve how much you can keep your cool and have a low error rate.”
He said he’s concerned that we’re not fielding “half a team, if we have the whole team” already.
“I don’t want a military institution that starts off with the premise that a woman can’t do something,” he said.
