Posted on 04/13/2003 2:02:45 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
You couldn't help but be elated upon hearing that Pfc. Jessica Lynch was rescued. But it was a little like the relief that parents experience before the anger sets in after junior has done a death-defying stunt and lived to tell about it.
Many brave men risked their lives to save Pfc. Lynch following an Iraqi man's report that a woman soldier was being tortured at a hospital. We still don't know what the Iraqis did to her. The two broken legs and spinal injury indicate torture. No word on whether she was sexually assaulted as well. Her comrades, most of them men, did not fare as well, with nearly a dozen bodies found.
Instead of shaking off our '60s feminist hangover and vowing to end the lunacy of sending young women like Miss Lynch into harm's way, you'd think her brutalization was actually a good thing.
Gen. Wilma Vaught, the harridan who wants to draft our daughters and put them into combat, gushed that Miss Lynch reportedly took out some Iraqis on the way to being captured, so this proves women ought to be in the front lines.
Liberals like the terminally grimacing Patricia Schroeder echoed the call, saying it is time to end all combat exemptions for women, since, in our enlightened way, we are not supposed to care that wives and daughters are turned into hamburger by enemy troops.
Liberalism has a remarkable record for worsening any situation. Are welfare programs destroying black families and creating poverty and crime in the nation's cities? Throw more money at them to snag even more people into a failed system! Does gun control exacerbate crime by disarming innocent citizens? Press for tighter controls!
On the military front, the armed forces have been in full retreat from liberal feminists. If the Navy's Tailhook sex scandal during the '90s proved anything, it is that men and women mixed tightly together will create spontaneous combustion. Instead of admitting this simple truth, feminists used Tailhook to "out" recalcitrant traditionalists who opposed putting women closer to combat. Naval officers who could fearlessly face down enemy fire cowered before the, uh, ladies.
The same folly was at work recently at the Air Force Academy, where several female cadets reported sexual assaults by male cadets. The Academy's response? They took down the big letters over a stone arch that read: "Bring Me Men." That's right, men. Real men. The kind that don't assault women and who think that protecting women from harm is one of the duties that God assigned them. Let's opt for androgyny instead.
The more that we buy into the fiction that women are indistinguishable from men, the more we sleepwalk into an unfolding disaster.
Forget about Miss Lynch for a moment. How about Pfc. Lori Ann Peistewa, the first U.S. servicewomen killed in Iraq? She left behind two preschool kids, aged 3 and 4. Her body was found at the site where Miss Lynch was rescued. Or how about Shoshana Johnson, a single mother of a 2-year-old? We have not heard anything about her since the Iraqis released a haunting photo of her frightened face, along with those of some male comrades.
"Jessica was a clerk, essentially a secretary, doing yeoman's work, I might add," said Martha Kleder, a Culture and Family Institute policy analyst who served with the Air Force in Alaska. "Shoshana Johnson joined the Army to be a cook. Today, no woman is safe in the military. There are no more rear-support jobs. All women should expect to be made cannon fodder. Thanks, Pat Schroeder, thanks for your utter glee that these women who only wanted to serve their country in rear-support jobs are now facing hostile enemy fire."
Political correctness at the Pentagon hangs in the air like Napalm smoke. At the press conference announcing Miss Lynch's rescue, the spokesman lauded her as a "brave woman," and then turned to give credit to her rescuers. "We have to remember" – and then he paused ever so slightly – "the brave souls" who risked their lives to save Miss Lynch. Had he used the term "brave men," it would have clarified the absurdity of putting Miss Lynch near the front lines in the first place.
Americans are probably largely unaware that women are prohibited from being on the front lines, a policy increasingly being broken by our gender-neutral military.
The practice of turning women into cannon fodder got a huge boost when the Clinton administration largely dispensed with the "risk rule," which exempts women from jobs in which they are likely to face enemy fire. Although women are still not technically in combat, it sure looks like they are.
Take 2nd Lt. Sarah Ewing Skinner, for instance. With her "finger on the trigger of her M-16, [she] gives the order to move forward as troops under her command prepared to storm 20 derelict buildings where die-hard Iraqi defenders may have taken refuge," the Associated Press reports in an article headlined "Not for men only." Now isn't that special? Women are supposed to be exempted from combat, and yet they are going house to house just like the grizzled Vic Morrow and his squad in the old "Combat" TV show.
The loophole is that they are serving as military police, and those squads have been ordered to do dangerous cleanup work that looks a lot like combat. In fact, it is combat.
"In Iraq, this stuff includes escorting supply convoys through ambush-prone areas, sweeping villages for weapons, arresting Iraqis hostile to U.S. forces and handling prisoners of war," AP said. Pvt. Kristi Grant, a military policewoman, told AP, "I guess the only thing is that I can't lift some of the same things males do, but I try." How would you like to be her comrade, wounded and in need of being dragged to safety? A good try wouldn't cut it.
There are some other key physical differences between the sexes, but you would never know it from the AP report. Sex means nothing: "She quickly got over her initial anxiety about being squeezed into a tent with male soldiers and discovered 'we were much like one family.'" Nothing about the jealousy, broken marriages and fights that erupted during the Gulf War when men and women were billeted together. Do any parents really want their 20-year-old daughter sleeping in a tent with a bunch of men?
"Women are treated like trash, they're objects in the service," said former Marine Cpl. Carmelo Torres. "They may talk PC, but it's a different story behind closed doors. Women are treated like dirt."
Torres recalls being stationed at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia and seeing staff sergeants picking out attractive young women and declaring them off-limits to other men. "In the women's barracks, the women were being sexually harassed by the lesbians when they weren't being hit on by the men," he said. "Two of the lesbians got new recruits drunk so they could gang-rape them in the women's barracks."
This is not about military women's willingness to serve their country, which is commendable, or their bravery. America owes much to its women service members.
But they shouldn't be in combat. First, they are the bearers of life and the heart of family life, an utterly indispensable role. When America sends young women off to war, watching them kiss their toddlers goodbye, we are making a moral choice that children are just not important anymore. It is much more important to drive a military truck. This callousness is an outgrowth of the abortion culture in which human life itself is cheapened. Any job those women do could be done by a man, but nobody else can be a mother to her children. It is bad enough for children to lose their father, but it is utterly unnecessary for them to lose their mother. Raising children is the most important job in society, and yet it takes a back seat to feminist ambitions to pursue sameness in the name of equality.
Second, women lack the upper-body strength, endurance and speed of men, which, despite all the talk of "push-button wars," can be crucial in battle. As Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness has said, "Women don't have an equal ability to survive on the battlefield."
Third, although some feminists claim that they have a right to serve if they want to, military service is a privilege and a duty – not a right. The armed forces bar numerous classes of people, regardless of individual ability, because they could have a negative impact. Homosexuals are a case in point. Putting women into combat endangers all of our daughters because in the 1986 case Rostker v. Goldberg, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women could not be drafted because they did not serve in combat, and that Congress had the power only to raise armies to fight wars. A few feminists in the front lines could destroy that exemption.
Fourth, women have a profound effect on men. In 1948, the Israelis put women soldiers into the front lines, but had to pull them after a few weeks. Discipline broke down, morale plummeted and men ignored orders, rushing instead to protect the women. Some men lost their sanity when they saw women being blown apart. These men must have been chauvinist pigs.
The Israelis quickly grasped that women have no business being in combat, and that is their policy to this day. They train women for emergency situations, removing them if combat begins. But we have brushed aside that lesson. We are actually training men to ignore their noble impulse of being protectors. The Navy introduced a program a few years ago in which men were conditioned to endure the cries of women being tortured. The other services have adopted these programs as well. This is progress?
Imagine what these men will be like when the war is over and they return to civilian life. Do we really want thousands of men among us who are indifferent to women's cries of pain? That's a recipe for domestic violence and rape. The floodtide of pornography only makes it worse. But liberals like porn. It's religion they despise. As C.S. Lewis said, the social goal of liberals is to make religion private and pornography public.
It is barbaric to allow pornography to permeate our entire culture, and it is barbaric to put women in combat, even if they are fool enough to want to go.
We're glad that Miss Lynch made it to safety, but we would like to see the larger question addressed. What was she doing there in the first place?
Very insightful...
I am going back and forth on this one. On the one hand there's the "well she signed up for it!" crowd, and on the other, the folks saying "she didn't sign up for THAT..."
From the description above, sounds like the only women who "make it" are lesbians... Well I have seen some butched up chicks who could probably kick the a$$es of most men who crossed 'em...
And then we should allow the women who pass those standards into combat, because they have PROVEN that they are able to handle it.
No doubt they would have risked their lives to save a male soldier as well.
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