Mothers Must be Careful NOT to Allow New Rules in Military Sneaked in Under the Radar

Combat Ban Wrong Move, NOW President Says
May 12, 2005

NOW President Kim Gandy criticized a House Military Personnel Subcommittee action on Tuesday that would prohibit women from serving in support units that assist in direct ground combat. With little prior notice, the measure was brought up as an amendment to the 2006 defense spending bill by House Armed Services Committee Chair Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and passed along party lines.

"We are not fooled by this Republican-led effort that supposedly would 'protect' women in the military — it is just another poorly veiled attempt to keep servicewomen from advancing to higher positions in the military," Gandy said.

Although NOW opposes the ill-advised war in Iraq, and urges the Congress to act quickly to bring home both our daughters and our sons, this ban is not a positive development for women. This broad prohibition would deny women access to thousands of positions currently open to them and would constrain their promotion to higher ranks.

Army leaders sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday criticizing the legislation, stressing that women are serving magnificently in a wide range of roles and noting that armed conflict now often has no clear front lines. According to the Washington Post, Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, said that such a prohibition "will cause confusion in the ranks and send the wrong signal to the brave young men and women fighting the Global War on terrorism."

A reorganization of the Army, beginning last year, established new "mixed-sex" forward support companies designed to be placed with combat battalions in order to more efficiently provide supplies and perform maintenance duties. Congressional Republicans assert that this change violates a 1994 military policy that bans from women from being in contact with direct ground combat units, but Army sources say that they have adjusted the re-organization to comply with the policy.

Democrats, including Reps. Loretta Sanchez (Calif.) and Cynthia McKinney (Ga.), were critical of the amendment, saying that it could worsen recruitment at a critical time for the Army and that it amounted to discrimination to bar women from serving the battlefield.

As always, feminists have totally misstated the issue here, just as they did when they managed to sneak gender neutral custody laws under the radar of most mothers and now hundreds of thousands of mothers have lost our children because of this. The bottom line here is to permit the few women who really care about this issue to be allowed further access to the front lines would mean EVERY women, including pregnant women and mothers, would be giving up her right to NOT have to register for future military service.

Of course, this is feminism’s ultimate goal here: a totally gender neutralized society where 50% of the armed forces is female, 50% (or more) of mothers to NOT have our children, 50% of all deathrow inmates to be women, etc. Coincidentally this is ALSO the goal of men/fathers’ rights advocates, so these supposedly arch enemies are, in fact, frequently working towards common goals; albeit, unwittingly, or so they both claim.

Anyway, a basic misunderstanding appears to come into play here when people frame the women in combat issue as an issue of each individual women’s choice or of women being “held back” from career opportunities (which by the way was the same reasoning used when feminists first framed gender neutral custody, they postulated it as a good thing for mothers as we would no longer have the burden of the ‘shit’ work of raising our own children, as they referred to it, and instead be allowed more time to build important careers).

Needless to say, ONLY a men’s/fathers’ rights advocate or a childfree feminist would think there was anything more important to a mother then her own children. So that’s another one of their commonalities.

Nevertheless, my basic point remains that women must be wary of the choices other women make regarding front line combat for it can come back to haunt all women, especially those of us who are mothers. The problem that most of us NEED to understand is that the ONLY reason women are exempt from having to register for military service is because we are NOT allowed into combat. So ANY women deciding to forego their rights in this area, puts every other women at risk of having to register in the future. OR of having our daughters forced into registration and compulsory military service at some future date.

This, of course, is feminism ultimate goal and, of course, anything harmful to women is lauded by men/fathers rights advocates; so thousands of women being killed or captured would not bother EITHER of these two groups in the least.

Anyway back to the history, the issue of women in combat (and thus, indirectly of women having to register for military service at all) was supposedly settled over 20 years ago when the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces released their findings. The Commission was originally formed in an attempt by the Clinton administration catering to its feminist allies to find reasons to ALLOW women into combat. Unfortunately for these gender-neutralized groups of social engineers (but lucky for mothers and our children), their finding ultimately supported just the opposite conclusion.

It appeared that the best women, even with special forces training, were just barely able to hold their own with the weakest men (which are the men, btw, that the military is usually trying to screen OUT of the services) Thus, Les Aspin ruled (quite sensibly) that based upon these findings of the limits of women’s physical strength, we could not be allowed into the front lines nor into any of the special forces units, such as the Navy Seals, Rangers, etc.,.*

Of course, various men (probably jealous of womens exemption) immediately started filing lawsuits in the Supreme Court to try and force women into having to register, at least, just as they are made to do. I often wonder if women could petition the Supreme Court to ‘force’ men to go through the inconvenience, suffering and sheer bloody mess of the whole childbearing situation, how many of them would actually then chose to be fathers…Anyway their ultimate goal was to get ALL women forced into compulsory military service, including being placed into the front lines.

The Supreme Court ruled that since registration was for the purpose of a possible draft with the ultimate goal being to fight in a war and women were NOT allowed to go into front line combat, our exemption from registration was legal. You can see, however, where this whole line of legal reasoning could be overturned in a matter of months if a limited number of women decided to experiment with their own lives and enter into front line combat. These women would undercut the primary underpinnings of the decision that exempted ALL women from having to register and ultimately could force women to have to serve in the military at some future date. AND please do NOT say this won't happen as people said the same crap about gender neutral custody vis-a-vis babies and now mothers routinely lose newborn babies and never even see them again.

So let'e not say what's possible here, as anything is...

Of course, realistically speaking women might have to accept compulsory military service someday, but I’m not sure that this should require women being on the front lines. We might discuss this and decide it is our duty. But one thing I am sure of, is that MOTHERS need to have this debate with our eyes wide open, not be tricked into it the way feminists and mens/fathers’ rights advocates did to us with gender neutral custody. Let’s understand ALL the options here and where this could ultimately lead with us, as well as what it could mean for our daughters in the future.

Furthermore let's ensure that there are NO exemptions allowed for professional women here, especially attorneys, as many of these childfree feminist women go into the legal field where they do much damage to mothers with spiteful rulings and bias against us when they become Judges, GALs, family law attorneys, etc.,. We need to make damn sure they don't manage to get themselves exempt from military service the way they've mananged to remain childfree; and thus protect themselves from the gender neutral custody laws they've inflicted on other women and their children.

This is a MUST as these childfree feminists will surely look to include an exception within the law for themselves; so they can be exempt from military service while the rest of us are forced to serve...

One way to handle it, for instance, might be to agree to the registration and front line combat, but strictly limit the exemptions allowable. Maybe just allowing exemptions for two categories of women, 1) handicapped women (which pregnant women would fall under); and, 2) an exemption for mothers. After all women going through childbirth should be considered having already fulfilled their obligatory suffering/duty quotient for their society that serving in the military provides for men. Some societies, such as the ancient Greeks even considered women bearing children to be the physical equivalent of front line military duty for men and even Sparta exempted women from military service with that as the reasoning.

This would have the advantage of leaving the military option for child-free feminists who give NOTHING back to their society by either having children OR serving in the military (now they can pick one or the other); instead of sitting around all day pontificating about other women who actually do contribute something. Thus, the future Cathy Youngs, Wendy McElroys, Judge Arlene Goldbergs of the world can finally do something useful for the countries that have given them so much; instead of what they currently do denigrating the mothers of the next generation, who make a more valuable contribution to society then they do…

After all, it seems only fitting that the childfree supporters of NOW and ifeminist, who are the mothers of the mens/fathers rights movement in so many ways, should be the first to reap the full advantage of a major victory against bias…which they helped engineer.


*Certain of this information from an online article "What Kind of Nation Sends Women into Combat" by syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood who served on the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. April 16, 2003.