Santorum says ‘other types of emotions’ could preclude women in combat.

I agree that it doesn’t matter much in this election, only I have to atleast get a little idea about the era to know what everybody is always talking about all the time... 1994 1994, I still haven’t got a good handle on that... Some people are really lost in much of the history out there, while still feeling it’s not really important..

first, you are right about calling you guys sanctimonium supporters, but he is just such a pompous ass sometimes... and nobody likes being lectured to, whether it’s by Michelle Obama or Rick Santorum... (there, said it the right way)... REpublicans get really critical and down on Michelle for telling people how to treat their bodies, and Santorum - said it the right way twice - tells people how to treat their souls and their hearts, and most importantly their spirits... and if you are a true christian, the way he abrogates the work of Christ with his gospel of works and pharisee’s spirit, is really distateful and anathema to many many christians..

Yes, I agree about women and the dignity and valor of raising children... I don’t even disagree with Santorum - about that, or his military statements... he just speaks to his base with this stuff - to prove something, or stroke them, like a few days in CO when James Dobson was up on stage with him, and Santorum said, “God called me to run”... I just think that is way over the top...

And finally, if she is who I am thinking it is, I think she was a pilot, and maybe her name was Flynn, but whoever that particular person, I remember reading a book she wrote later, where she described what happened, and said she just closed her eyes, and couldn’t believe what was happening to her... and she also said women are taught ways to cope with that type of assault by dissociative mechanisms they can learn... all in all, she was really very clinical about it... it stayed with me for some reason. She was brave and yet very vulnerable at the same time...

I think you’re right all the way around. I think it should be voluntary, and there are certain women who can handle the stress better than the men. There is, I think, a real controversy about upper body, and other physical strength deficiencies, and I think they should be dealt with on a specific basis according to job and assignment...

I just think all war is demoralizing and dehumanizing, and I try not to think about it much, which is hard because I come from a military family... and have loved ones and friends all over this teetering jittery world, and barack obama does exactly invoke confidence... he is really messing with the military bigtime in ways that never make it to the news... and I think he has some real designs on using the military to help him get reelected...

I don’t say bad things about other candidates, I say truthfuul, edgy comments, which some holier-than-thou uptight types get bent out of shape over...

159 posted on Saturday, February 11, 2012 2:16:41 AM by TigersEye: “Apparently that statement was just a load of bull chips. You gave it a valiant effort though.”

To TigersEye: Thank you for your compliments on my “valiant effort.” True Believer Forever did respond several items farther down.

To True Believer, I think in many ways, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are more alike than different. Both are intellectual men who understand how to appeal to blue-collar populist voters. Both are strong conservatives on many issues who, over their careers in politics, have sometimes cast votes or taken positions which accurately reflected the desires of their constituents or reflected the party loyalty necessary to be in Republican leadership roles, but which have now become annoyances to the broader conservative movement.

There's a broader principle here at stake, however. The conservative movement has a tendency to be anti-intellectual and to substitute fire and loudness for rational argument.

I realize there are reasons for that — the academy has largely been taken over by left-wing intellectuals who create pseudo-intellectual arguments that sound good and are complicated to refute logically, but are dead wrong.

It's easier to rebuke that stuff than to refute it, and rebuking often works better with the voters. Sound bites work. Sustained, rational, logical arguments turn off many voters, or at least get ignored.

The problem is that both types of argument are needed or conservatives look like ignoramuses and idiots who scream without thinking. We definitely need “great communicator” men like Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, but we also need Buckleys and Wills and others like them to back up the sound bites with hard-hitting heavy logic.

As we've seen with Newt Gingrich's attacks on the media, a loud shoutback plays better to the conservative audience than a complicated rational refutation of intellectual nonsense. Gingrich knows what works with the conservative primary electorate, and rationally picking a bad argument apart piece by piece often isn't it. Gingrich is far from stupid — he's a former professor, and even the liberals recognize he's usually the smartest guy in the room, and it takes a great deal to get a liberal to acknowledge the intellectual competence of a conservative. That's part of why Gingrich gets away with his attacks — everybody knows he is an intellectual who could blow away many of his opponents with hard logic and does so in print and in books, but in TV debates, he chooses to use methods which work better with voters.

I don't know Rick Santorum personally in any way. I haven't followed his career the way I've followed that of Newt Gingrich (with a lot of appreciation for Gingrich's accomplishments, by the way). I'm fully aware that means I could be seriously surprised down the road when something comes out about Santorum that I won't like that is consistent with the core message he's been saying all along. An obvious example may be that his Roman Catholicism could be of a hard-right variety which will get him into the same types of trouble that Michele Bachmann’s Wisconsin Synod Lutheranism caused her — I'll defend Santorum’s right to practice his faith, but there may be people who will be seriously turned off by hard-right Catholicism since we don't see it very often on the national political scene.

However, Santorum was vetted extensively and aggressively by the news media in a left-of-center state, and his reputation for being anti-gay and anti-abortion has generated some of the most vicious attacks imaginable. I don't think we need to be worried about something coming out which paints Santorum as being radically different from what he presents himself as being.

Where the two men differ most noticeably is the public priority they place on social conservative issues. Newt Gingrich votes right on abortion, gay marriage, etc., and I think he believes in his votes on those issues. I think he has a culturally conservative view of the importance of public morality. I'm impressed by this item by the pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego commenting on Gingrich's personal faith journey, especially his understanding of the importance of the war against Islamofascism:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2822096/posts

Nobody doubts that Santorum is a culture warrior. Nobody doubts that Gingrich is a warrior against secular liberalism. Those are related though not identical fights — wars against the same enemy on two different but interlocking fronts. I think in many ways the difference between the two men is more a matter of emphasis than actual votes, and they attract many of the same enemies. Are we going to think that the homosexual lobby who made Rick Santorum synonymous on the internet with a byproduct of anal gay sex will somehow like Newt Gingrich better?

Both men would be acceptable presidents.

I happen to think Gingrich has more experience and on paper is a better candidate, but he also has some serious baggage, and I fear that some of his supporters represent the kind of anti-Christian conservatism that has become common in European conservative parties. I also fear that his past will cause too many social conservatives to stay home on election day.

At the same time, Rick Santorum has a documented history of being able to appeal to the voters in northern industrial swing states who we absolutely **MUST** have to win the 2012 presidential election, and he has a reasonable chance of being able to win Hispanic Roman Catholic voters in other states which could potentially become swing states if President Obama keeps up his attacks on the Roman Catholic Church.

I'll almost certainly vote for Newt Gingrich if he wins the 2012 Republican nomination, but I'll be hoping his baggage doesn't blow up. With Santorum, I think it's pretty clear that his liabilities are simply the opposite side of the coin of his assets.

End result: I think a Republican can reasonably vote for either candidate. I almost always vote for the person with more experience, and that's Gingrich. I can understand why people will vote for him this year, though he's not my preferred candidate. If he wins, I'll almost certainly get behind him and work for his election, and I'll hope my fears prove to be unfounded.

“Rick only spoke the truth. Men can’t help having different feelings for women than they do for men. Guys don’t deal well with seeing women killed or maimed,”

That’s exactly how I interpreted his statement. A decent man’s instincts are to defer to, and protect, women. If those instincts cause a man in battle to react too slowly to danger, even for a split second, God help him/us. For women to get their little panties in a wad over the statement is another case of political correctness run amok. It’s exactly what blacks do when their fragile little antennae pick up something they can twist to make them victims.

He didn’t say women are weaker or inferior.

Anyhow, having women in more intensive combat situations was a dismal failure in Israel. Maybe we should learn.

I'm not going to run around advocating women in combat units, especially on Free Republic. That would be just plain stupid.

I'm also not going to try to tell the Israelis how to run their army. There is no other Western country in the modern world (and in most ways the Israelis are a Western country) that has experienced anything close to their situation in Israel with a need for combat readiness. The closest parallel would be South Korea, but that's a cold war, not a shooting war like Israel has faced repeatedly in the last six decades. If drafting women but not putting them in combat units works for Israel, well, as far as I'm concerned, we might as well let the generals decide what works best in their context.

Now having said all that, let's get real. There no longer are defined “front lines” in the types of wars we now fight, so no matter what kind of jobs we allow women to perform in the military, we must train them for combat. The first woman to receive the Silver Star since World War II did so as a military policewoman guarding a convoy that got attacked. She successfully used her training to defend the convoy during 45 minutes of intensive combat, literally in the trenches with grenades and bullets.

Read this NPR story about Hester: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/22/133847765/silver-star-recipient-a-reluctant-hero

That's what women in the military have to face today. Even in World War II, several Army nurses received the Silver Star for evacuating a hospital under fire.

Most women don't want to do that kind of thing. Some women do. My read of the situation is that the type of women who want to serve in that type of role are generally tomboy women with a long history of aggressiveness and often were successful female athletes in high school. I don't have a problem with the very few women who want that kind of life doing jobs that most men don't want to do — but only if they're good enough to do the jobs as well as their male colleagues.

BTW, I know very well that women are quite capable of being excellent shots, and a well-trained tiny woman with a gun is quite capable of taking out a big guy no matter how physically strong he is.

My own mother, a girly-girl sorority sister type, had a father who was a football coach and loved to hunt and fish. My mother, back in her journalism school days, routinely embarrassed men and even police officers by outshooting them — and that was back in the 1950s when women simply did **NOT** do things like hunt and shoot. She was recruited to join the military as a public affairs officer but never did so; I think she probably would have enjoyed the military life, especially being able to outshoot most of the men around her. I think we underestimate women if we think some of them are not capable of doing as well if not better than the guys — and sometimes it's the littlest women who make the best soldiers. As the old saying goes, dynamite comes in small packages.

Here's something else interesting on the women-in-combat issue, from one of the first female generals in the military, USAF BG Wilma Vaught (Ret.), who now heads the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Va. She talks about how she was taught how to sit and how to put on makeup because female officers had to be “attractive and charming,” but not how to salute or shoot:

“Vaught broke her fair share of glass ceilings. She was the first woman to deploy with an Air Force bomber wing. She was promoted to brigadier general in 1980, and when she retired five years later, she was only one of seven female generals or admirals in all the armed forces. But in close to 30 years of military service, she never had to fire a gun. In fact, she got her brother-in-law to teach her how to use one because the Air Force wouldn't. But today, hundreds of thousands of women have served in wars with no clear front lines, often caught up in direct combat. Vaught wonders aloud, ‘If I were in the military today, would I be able to do these things? I would like to think I would, but I don't know, because, you know, the challenges are just so great. It's a different military. It really is.’”

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/23/133966767/general-remembers-her-different-military-days

I think virtually all of us can agree that the 1950s-era attitudes toward women in the military were wrong. Women are capable of doing much more than sitting pretty and being charming.

And as for the idea voiced by members of Congress that women shouldn't be allowed to become generals because by the time they were in their 50s they'd be in menopause and making irrational decisions... well... what I want to say can't be printed. I'll let women like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann say what needs to be said about mature women in leadership roles.

I guess I'm glad I didn't live back then since I'd be accused of being a liberal for saying women should have the right to choose whatever careers they want as long as they can meet the standards to do the job.

That goes without saying. You can ask a couple of guys with broken noses about that. :-}

Problem is that standards are across the board watered down so women can appear to make the grade. All across the board. Plus having certain numbers to be filled with women. Totally bad. It can’t be fixed without being dismantled.

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I agree with everything you say. And Newt’s numbers with women are problematic... but he does have crossover appeal because I live a life and work with almost all libs or moderates or lefties, some republicans, but few... And I have changed many many many minds about Newt, to vote for Newt... but it was certainly a journey to get there... IF and it is a big IF, if you can get them to sit and watch two or three things featuring Newt, if you can get them to read just a little, they flip. But the clock is ticking...

The evangelicals in SC proved they could be forgiving... but I don’t know how much of a fluke that was, either.

She’s proof of what you say, some women, who know what it’s about, still want it... and should have that right. Her comment that stuck with me from that article, “It’s not like you see in the movies.” Oh, baby.

I don’t need to ask them. I’m a mother. ;o)

170 posted on Saturday, February 11, 2012 1:47:16 PM by little jeremiah: “Problem is that standards are across the board watered down so women can appear to make the grade. All across the board. Plus having certain numbers to be filled with women. Totally bad. It can’t be fixed without being dismantled.”

You won't hear me disagreeing.

If a woman can do the job, fine. So we know if she can do the job, we need standards that reflect ability to do the job. I'm not sure I care about different standards on how many pushups a man and woman have to do — there is something to be said for minimal standards that every soldier must meet being gender-differentiated — but for the more physically intensive jobs, the standards need to reflect reality.

I know black female soldiers who couldn't get into the broadcast journalism part of PAO operations because they still had a hint of an ethnic accent — one which if I didn't know they were black, I might not have noticed. OK, that's the Army's choice. The result is the Army has standards that have the effect of keeping some blacks out of some career paths, when an ethnic accent that's not distracting may actually be an advantage for a civilian reporter in certain southern and urban markets. Apparently the Army wants higher standards for its communicators than the civilian media world.

So why can't we create a rule that women must be able to lift and carry a soldier with fully body armor a certain distance to be involved in certain types of operations? Seems to me that's much less discriminatory than the existing rules.

But then again, it's the Army — logic doesn't always apply. /sarc

173 posted on Saturday, February 11, 2012 5:46:10 PM by true believer forever: “She’s proof of what you say, some women, who know what it’s about, still want it... and should have that right. Her comment that stuck with me from that article, “It’s not like you see in the movies.” Oh, baby.”

We're on the same page.

I remember the first time I went to a crash scene and walked up to the severed head of a motorcyclist who had been decapitated.

Lots of people would quit the next day. I didn't.

I've now seen hundreds of dead and severely injured people, including many different methods of violent death and injury, plus the stench of rotting corpses. Of course the camera stays down until the bodies are removed — I care about the burning building or collapsing wall or smashed car, not the bodies — but that doesn't mean I don't see some horrible things that I never photograph.

It's not for everybody, but everybody who wants to deal with that kind of stuff needs to get used to it or get out.

When my niece started getting interested in the military, I started taking her with me to crash scenes. It was only a couple of weeks before she was with me at a horrible fatal crash and had to see the paramedics try and fail to save the victim, and then see the victim's spouse and children come to the crash scene.

I encouraged her to take additional classes to become an EMT. As part of her civilian EMT training, she went out to real crash scenes, including ones with multiple fatalities and critical injuries. She's now seen more dead and critically injured people than most if not all of the people in her ROTC program except those with prior enlisted military service.

If a woman wants to get into the military, she needs to know what she faces. Some want it. Most don't. I'm very thankful for those who do.

That was a very gruesome post and very difficult to read, but it was reality, to say the least. I sometimes think, and I probably could be biased being a woman, but I sometimes think the women military I know, who have been to some horrible places, handle it better than men... not as a token of strength, but they let themselves grieve... and they carry on masterfully, and sometimes unbelievably, while they are grieving... and men won’t allow themselves that luxury or vulnerability... the women I know who have seen and been part of awful things in war are very etched by it, and deepened in a way that differs from men... I don’t understand any of it at all, except for wishing it all could stop forever...

Thank you, TBF... you're definitely right about gruesomeness. It's a reality of the work I do.

As a reporter I also deal with crime, corruption, incompetence, lying, and outright theft on a fairly regular basis. In the long run, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the taxpayers is worse than dealing with a horrific crash scene, crime scene, or fire — but the emotions generated from seeing a public servant stealing money from the accounts of elderly senior citizens that they were supposed to manage (a real case, BTW) are not the same as seeing body parts strewn all over the place or seeing half-burned corpses from a fire.

I agree with you that in some ways some women have more resilience than most men. For the small number of women who are capable of being soldiers, and the larger but still small number of women who are capable of working as EMTs, paramedics, trauma nurses, or emergency room doctors, seeing that kind of thing may not generate the same emotions as it does in men, and also women have social permission to deal with those emotions in different ways. It's not for nothing that the “mama grizzly” personality goes into overdrive for some women in command positions in a combat environment — “These are my boys and I'm going to bring them home” is a phrase that both men and women can say, but some women mean it differently than the way male commanders mean the same words. If it works, that's good enough for me.

Of course, I don't want to stereotype. Some women, especially those raised as tomboys in military homes or as daughters of policemen, may act very much like men.

What counts with me is not the gender of the servicemembers. It isn't important to me how they handle the job emotionally as long as they handle it. For those women who can handle it, my hat is off to them. They've volunteered to do things almost no men want to do in modern America, and they deserve every bit of the appreciation we've always given to our “boys in uniform.”