Posted on 02/01/2013 9:38:49 AM PST by Kaslin
And so it came, the coup de grace. The final "barrier" to "opportunities" for women in combat is no more. With a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role is off-limits to the female sex. The defense secretary and the general thus liberated mothers, daughters, sisters and wives to kill and be killed in the infantry, commando raids, even in Obama administration "overseas contingency operations." In so doing, they also slashed away at that last institutional protection for the space that separates men and women, where civilization once grew.
It (civilization) has been struggling there for decades, as social engineers and radical feminists -- all heirs to Marx -- have been cutting away at elemental human instinct, social grace, language and thought itself. This overhaul of manners and mores, the family structure and marriage -- even private aspects of the relationship between men and women -- has been successful to a point where the cultural argument against women in combat (women in the military being a lost cause) is rarely voiced, not even on the right. (I watched Fox News on women-in-combat announcement day, listening in vain for just one culture warrior.)
We are left to make only the utilitarian arguments -- body strength and speed, unit cohesion, even urinary tract infections and other hazards that front-line deployment pose to females. These are compellingly logical points, but they are unlikely to reverse an ideological juggernaut. When the secretary of defense says putting women in combat is about "making our military ... and America stronger" and no one says he's lying to further a Marxian ideal via social engineering, the cultural argument is lost, and the culture it comes from is bound and gagged, hostage to what we know as "political correctness."
I still see threads of the cultural argument in emails and some blog responses to the Pentagon's latest whack at creating "gender neutrality." It erupts like a reflex against the conditioning to deny differences defined, at their essence, by muscle mass and womb. Such conditioning erodes the male protective instinct -- which, surely, is what war is supposed to arise from -- and the female nurturing instinct, which surely is what a civilization depends on.
No more. Women with wombs and without manly muscle mass now count as Pentagon-approved "warriors," modern-day knights in Kevlar, soon to be humping 80-pound packs over mountain and desert.
Or maybe not. Didn't Gen. Dempsey indicate that dropping some of those old-fashioned strength and speed requirements might be in order? "If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn't make it," Dempsey said last week, "the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?" Of course not! Why train Navy SEALs when Navy OTTERs will do as well?
And what about their children, when these front-line warriors bear them? And their pregnancies, when they decide it's better for their mission, for their country, to terminate them? Don't think Daddy Government, once again, won't be a steady provider to his womenfolk.
And why not? "It is women who pass on the culture," my daughters' pediatrician -- a font of human wisdom after six of his own kids and endless patients -- used to tell me, his voice rising over baby girls screaming. But what kind of "gender-neutral" culture will they pass on?
Rather, what kind of gender-neutral culture have women already passed on? After all, this penultimate shift at the Pentagon (will the NFL be next?) is just the tail end of something, not the beginning -- the rewiring of the human spirit. In other words, the whole movement in the name of "equal rights" has no more to do with women being legally able to apply for a credit card and other aspects of equality before the law than ordering women into combat is about making the military and America stronger.
No, it's about behavioral manipulation and transformation -- the Equal Rights Amendment by executive fiat. These changes have been a long time coming. In my lifetime, I have watched even post-1960s standards of femininity, for example, plunge to a point where female tendencies toward privacy, intimacy and modesty have given way to norms of clinical-style revelation and numbing brazenness -- and I'm talking about today's "nice" girls, the ones who soon will be considered eligible for Selective Service.
Yes, I know, only 15 percent of our all-volunteer military is female -- even after decades of active government courtship to woo women into the ranks and make "a force that looks like America" (not Obama's Cabinet), as Bill Clinton has put it. But don't think this "opportunity" for the few comes without strings to the many. As Army Col. Ellen Haring pointed out on "PBS NewsHour" last week, "With full rights come full responsibilities."
And then what? Will gender-neutral raw recruits soon be brawling outside the bar (with the man "beating the snot" out of the woman, as one Iraq veteran recently suggested to me in an email)? Will gender-neutral male soldiers be trained out of their protective instinct toward women? Do we want to live with the results?
One senior officer with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan wrote this to me: "I would never want my mother, sisters, wife or daughter to have to experience the ravages of combat or, worse, become a prisoner of war. It goes against every fiber of my being."
Yesterday's man. For a better tomorrow, we need more like him.
Do you actually believe carrying a rifle across your back in a climate-controlled building is the same as infantry combat?
Hot girls with guns.
Great pic!
I’m not sure I’d want to mess with ‘em myself.
He'll never make the general officer ranks in Obama's army.
Do you actually believe that any one of those women couldn’t kick your butt 7 ways til Sunday without blinking an eye?
No, but it's all that stuff they did before they earned the privilege of carrying a rifle across their backs that I think is the same.
You are right. Women in Israel do not serve in combat unit.
Any country that sends women to fight and kill is inherently perverse, unnatural, and anti-human.
No more rape charges.
If women are equal to men there is no way a man could rape one.
I'm sure any one of them could kick my butt. Then again, I'm a grey-haired couch potato. That's not the issue. The issue is, could any of them survive more than 30 seconds in a hand-to-hand encounter against an in-shape combat-trained MAN in his 20's? I don't think so.
The standard is based on what an acceptable number of applicants will pass, in order to fulfill service requirements. If the passing applicant set are all men, then it should not matter.
This is the logical extension of the "affirmative action" mentality that was applied to race "If not enough minorities pass the tests of literacy or mental ability, then the test itself is at fault".
Could they shoot and kill me? Undoubtedly. Could they win in hand to hand or carry the same level of gear into a combat zone or heft another warfighter over their shoulder and carry them a mile to safety? I don't think that at all.
We can all cite examples of extraordinary woman who have fought and fought well but they were extraordinary.
In this case they are citizens of a country that is very small and surrounded by vicious enemies. I admire them greatly but arming woman and sending them into combat when there are able bodied men to fight is a rejection of reason and logic.
Lots of sexual assaults but not all are rapes. A lot of the “rapes” are soldiers climbing into each others bunks voluntarily.
What is not stated in the reports are some of the assaults are not soldier on soldier. They throw in off post assaults as well as assaults by non US personnel.
Either way the statement you mentioned is claimed to be one of the reasons why the assault rates are thru the roof.
I actually date the loss of our civilization to when we allowed women the vote. Once ‘compassionate, caring’ women had the right to vote, we were doomed.
Particularly single women. Single women, as a whole, want to be married to Mr Government.
“Do you actually believe that any one of those women couldn’t kick your butt 7 ways til Sunday without blinking an eye?”
Not unless I wanted them to...and I’m in my 50s.
In my lifetime, I have watched even post-1960s standards of femininity, for example, plunge to a point where female tendencies toward privacy, intimacy and modesty have given way to norms of clinical-style revelation and numbing brazenness....
&&&
Oh, yes, the progressives have been quite successful in their goal of destroying women’s sense of modesty. It is quite appalling.
And what makes is so very sad is that there are so many in the Gen-X and later groups who have no idea of what has been lost. I see it even here on a conservative site.
Yes, I absolutely believe that. I'm six feet tall, 240 pounds. I bench over 300 pounds, squat over 400 pounds, and standing press over 200 pounds. I would break any one of them in half without breaking a sweat. Yet, despite all that, infantry combat was utterly exhausting and very, very demanding.
A uniform doesn't make you invincible. I've seen the dead bodies to prove my assertion. Women are not cut out for direct infantry combat, period.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.