I don’t oppose putting women
in combat because I believe women are incapable, I oppose sending women into
combat because I believe in civilization.
As someone who’s been
rejected from all four major branches of the armed services (maybe I should
have tried the Coast Guard), I’m the last person who has the right to catalogue
the horrors of war or detail military service with any first-hand war
experience. I spent most of the Iraq war typing angry libertarian screeds
against foreign intervention or denouncing George W. Bush from the comforts of
various New York bar stools, so if you ask me what combat credentials I have, I
have none.
No one questions that women
have served with distinction in uniform and many women are capable fighters. If
I’m blessed with daughters, I will certainly teach them how to shoot.
The responsibility to defend the country ultimately falls on every citizen,
male or female.
But being put into front-line
combat is not the same thing, and the government’s move to put women into
combat could indicate two very troubling things: either our military is
stretched so thin that it’s throwing women into the relentless deployments into
the Middle East or our President is
so ensconced in his own vision of himself as a progressive hero that he’s abandoned
any serious leadership as Commander in Chief.
Of course the supporters of
this policy are trotting out all kinds of medal-laden Pentagon brass to
reassure us that this is a thoughtful policy and how dare we question the
contributions to women in our society, etc. etc. All the false cultural battle
lines will be drawn and manned by the same predictable caricatures.
I’ll take my lumps as a
sexist civilian villain and retreat to the confines of science, biology and
knowledge of the world at large. Sure, men are more likely to be trigger-happy
meatheads, but a man cannot get pregnant. Of course many women are capable of
the grueling endurance needed for difficult missions, but women are more likely to be raped.
We can’t stop our own servicemen from raping women in the armed forces. How is it a tribute to women to put them into the
hands of our enemies?
This policy separates the
people who live in reality versus those who prefer their own progressive
version of it.
I hope we can all agree that
men and women should be treated equally under the law. The disabled and the
elderly should be treated equally under the law, but we don’t send the disabled
and the elderly into combat, even though I’m sure there are senior citizens and
paraplegics who are crack shots with a rifle. That’s not “ageist” or “able-ist,”
that’s just damn common sense.
When women, the old and the infirm
are on the front lines of combat, it means the country sending them into battle
is close to defeat, when its population of military-age men has been depleted
by the ravages of war.
What kind of country would
send women into combat when it didn’t have to? A self-defeating one, a nation
so obsessed with identity politics that we’re blinded to the cold hard facts of
life and death.
This policy is a sad, sad
mistake. It confuses the value of treating all people equally under the law
with a mandate to wipe away any meaningful standards that acknowledge
differences between the genders. That’s not progress, that’s self-satisfied ignorance
at the expense of women’s lives.
(Image taken from Reuters.)
(Image taken from Reuters.)
