Free Republic

There is a new lawsuit the federal courts demanding all exclusions barring women from ground combat positions be dropped in the name of equal opportunity. This would be a great mistake. We have achieved the right balance of opportunities for women and the requirement to maintain certain sex-based exclusions to meet our national interests. Women, such as General Ann Dunwoody, are commanding at the highest levels and serving effectively in many combat, combat related, and intelligence related roles. There are many brave women who are flying combat missions and out on patrols in Military Police, Civil Affairs, and Intelligence roles...

In Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge wishes that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” Scrooge would make the perfect public-school bureaucrat -- except he’d insist on calling it a holiday pudding, playing “Winter Wonderland” as background music, and doing it all in the name of inclusiveness, sensitivity and church-state separation. In the latest manifestation of what Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition calls “secular fundamentalism,” the South Orange/Mapplewood, New Jersey School District has banned playing the instrumental...