Tony Perkins (Getty)

Donald Trump’s “religious freedom” commissioner Tony Perkins has blamed gay soldiers for a rise in sexual assault reports in the military.

Perkins, who Trump appointed to sit on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, hit out at gay soldiers after a report found that reports of sexual assault in the military have risen by 38 percent since 2016.

The data from the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office found that female troops ages 17 to 24 were at the highest risk of being assaulted.

Female troops are six times more likely than men to be assaulted, and 96 percent of female respondents identified the alleged offenders as male.

However, Perkins claims that the problems are the fault of President Barack Obama, for permitting gay troops into the armed forces after the 2012 repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 2012.

Tony Perkins: ‘I told you so’

The head of the anti-LGBT Family Research Council claims: “It’s been nine years since Barack Obama and the liberals in Congress began their decade-long march of radical sexual experimentation in the military.

“While the dust from their forced march has yet to settle, a troubling image of their “new’ military is emerging.”

Hitting out at Democrat Jackie Speier, who has called for urgent military reforms to tackle the problem of sexual assault, Perkins wrote: “As far as military leaders are concerned, Congress has done quite enough, thankyouverymuch.

“Speier can complain all she wants, but in the end, she’s blaming the military for a problem her party helped create. She voted to overturn ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ too, so it’s a little late to be grumbling about the consequences.”

He went on to claim: “It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that when Congress introduced even more sexual tension into the troops, it put thousands of men and women in defenseless and compromising positions.

“The Left spent Barack Obama’s entire presidency sexualizing the military, beginning with the repeal of DADT — and continuing with the push for open transgenderism.

“Almost a decade later, I guess ‘we told you so’ isn’t a message his party wants to hear.”

Tony Perkins has extreme anti-LGBT record

Perkins was appointed to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2018 despite his extreme anti-LGBT beliefs, which led the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate the Family Research Council an anti-LGBT hate group.

Perkins claimed in a 2018 blog post that decriminalising homosexuality was a “mistake”.

The evangelical leader has also been condemned by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League for repeatedly linking gay rights to the Holocaust and comparing gay people to Nazis.

In 2014 Perkins insisted Christians are “going to find ourselves being loaded in cattle cars like it was when the Nazis took over before we realize we are in such terrible danger”.

He claimed that Christians are being sent to “camps”, and that soon gays are “going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians”.

Under the leadership of Perkins, FRC also cheered on the imposition of a harsh new anti-gay law in Uganda.