Some faithful pastors and congregations have submitted a resolution to the 2013 LCMS convention officially opposing women serving in combat. My church did that for 3 conventions, but it never made it to the convention floor. Now that our government has stopped pretending that it has been keeping women out of combat by officially okaying them being there, perhaps such a resolution has chance. Although, like the 3 submitted by by my congregation, Today’s Business relegates it to an omnibus resolution that sends it (once more) back to the CTCR, perhaps a woman addressing the floor committee could persuade them to at least let the convention consider it. If it could just get to the convention floor, it would be a start.
At the 2004 convention, I appeared before the floor committee. I asked, “Do any of you know how many women have died in the current wars?” No one did. I should have perhaps asked, “Do any of you care?” I did in fact say that if God came looking for Adam not Eve in the fallen paradise whom do you think He’ll come looking for to account for our unwillingness to speak clearly on the order of creation?
For those of you do care, of the 4,400 troops killed in Iraq, 110 were women. In the on and on and ongoing war in Afghanistan about 1,400 troops have been killed, 24 of them women. For comparison’s sake, look at the Vietnam War. Of the more than 58,000 dead, only eight were military women, all of them nurses. Two died of natural causes, one from shrapnel, and five from aircraft crashes. In our latest wars, few have been nurses (“Babes in Arms,” Chronicles, April 2011, 6). But they all have been someone’s daughter, wife, mother, or sister whom men are called on by God to protect.
134 out of 5,800 isn’t much, but it’s a start alright. It the start of something bigger, uglier, and wickeder than the past pusillanimous leadership of the LCMS could or was unwilling to imagine.
