That was the name of a supposed campaign behind Hillary for president. This picture should bother you. If it does not, go here: https://www.snopes.com/tag/hillary-for-america/ . But as you can see from the address it’s a Snopes cite exposing the poster campaign as a fraud on the Hillary candidacy. The fact that something like this can be carried out truly bothers me. But in this case is it really a fraud? Women in combat has been a liberal, more democrat than republican, cause celebre.
The issue is now known as Women in Combat, but that’s not where it started out. (By the way, this info comes from feminist writer Linda Francke pro-women in combat 1997 book.) It started in 1951 with The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, (DACOWITS). It is a powerful Defense Department civilian committee. It was formed in in 1951 by Defense Secretary George Marshall “to advise the Defense Department on the way to enlist and retain women during the manpower crisis of the Korean War.” Fast forward to 1991 where the push for Women in Combat begins in earnest and we find that few of the 35 women and only 2 of the men on the committee have firsthand experience in the military. But Marshall had anticipated military men not listing to civilians and awarded the members of DACOWITS the protocol rank of a 3-star general. (Ground Zero, Francke, 21, 22).
Here’s an example of how bizarre the thinking on this civilian panel got. The DACOWITS vice chair in 1991, Linda Bisson, was incensed that the Marines would not let women practice throwing live grenades – the Army did. The Marines didn’t because “women were not considered strong enough to throw grenades beyond the burst radius.” [That’s about 35 yards. You try throwing a 2 lb. weight over 100 feet.] (Ground Zero, Francke, 28). From a year 2000 book, also by a woman, it appears the Marines are right, and even some in the Army know this. A drill sergeant in 1998 at Fort Jackson was instructed that effort was as good as achievement and trainees were to be evaluated accordingly (i.e. Did they do their best? Then that’s a pass.). Several female recruits had just failed the grenade course and pleaded their case this way reports the drill sergeant. “They asked me why they didn’t pass, because they had tried as hard as they could. That’s when I kind of laid down the law. I said, ‘There are situations in war where your best effort doesn’t matter. You either throw a grenade out of bursting range or you get yourself and your buddies killed.’ They seemed kind of shocked at that” (Kinder, Gentler Military, 79).
The effort to get all combat exclusion laws removed – which they now are – started with the Navy and the Airforce. In 1981 The Supreme Court in Goldberg v. Rostker had upheld women’s ineligibility for draft registration because of them legally being excluded from combat. The debate that came to be known generically as ‘women in combat’” was really the combat exclusion laws which specifically covered women on ships and in the air but not on the ground. The Army and the Marines, not Congress, had set their own policies about ground troops (230-1). In 1992 a presidential commission voted decisively against women in ground combat and called on Congress to enact a new combat exclusion law shielding the Army and Marines from women and a hypothetical draft (254). The Clinton admiration threw out the presidential commission’s recommendations on combat in April 1993. They replaced the defining category of gender with individual qualifications (Ground Zero, Francke, 255).
The real push for women to be in combat came after the First Gulf War. But consider how bizarre that is considering the anomalies of that conflict, and I’m quoting the feminist, pro-women warrior writer: “Though students of military history cautioned that the Gulf conflict was a ‘distorted model of warfare’ and should not instruct public attitudes toward servicewomen, it did. ‘The image that came out of the Gulf War was of the professionalized women militarized patriot,’ wrote Cynthia Enloe in a paper delivered at a 1991 conference on ‘Women at War: Images of Women Soldiers’ held in Florence. ‘This was an image that liberal women’s advocates in the Congress, in DACOWITS, in the officer corps and in Washington lobbying organizations had been constructing and promoting for the past two decades’” (Ground Zero, Francke, 102-3).
And poll numbers show it worked. On the issue should women be in combat in 1980 52% said no to Gallup poll while 44% said yes. January 1990 after the hero of Panama Linda Bray story broke 72% said yes and 26% no (Ground Zero, Francke, 71). The Good Ship LCMS with her sails set for every wind of doctrine rejected my 2004, 2007, and 2010 national convention resolution that women had no vocation to defend men and therefore we as a church body were opposed to registering women for a draft. The resolution was never even allowed to get to the floor. Finally, at the 2016 convention it was allowed to get to the floor and actually passed. Then the Lutheran Witness published an article that made women in combat an adiaphora.
Even as the war against life hastens forward despite “the science” about life in the womb, so the DIS-ordering of creation continues apace. Not even feminist heroine Amelia Earhart gives them pause when she says, “’Men would rather vacate the arena [of combat] altogether than share it with women’” (Kinder, Gentler Military, Gutmann, 276). So men like John Keegan have little hope of being heard. In his 1993 The History of Warfare he notes that “’women…do not fight. They rarely fight among themselves and they never, in any military sense, fight men. If warfare is as old as history and as universal as mankind, we must now enter the supremely important limitation that it is an entirely masculine activity’” (Kinder, Gentler Military, Gutmann, 126).
When the Romans, and the Greeks before them, spoke of the Amazons, they knew they were telling never-going-to-happen stories like our time and space travel myths. But ever since Tomb Raider was released in 1996, we’ve begun to accept the mythology of a female warrior being as strong, as durable, as big as the male. Science says otherwise. I once watched an intense movie fight sequence between two women and I had to see how it could have been faked. It was two small Asians in front of a green screen [i].
Two things and then I will close this very long blog. If you start talking to anyone about excluding women from combat roles, they will bring up the Israelis. Here are the facts according to the anti-women in combat but pro-women book that came out in 2000: Women are something of an afterthought in the Israel Defense Force. “In fact, its women are far less equal than ours. Israeli women serve in a separate division named CHEN (the acronym means ‘grace’ in Hebrew). They train separately from men and with female instructors. They enjoy a shorter period of conscription and are eligible for many waivers from service the men are not. And they have been kept much farther from the front lines….The widespread misimpression that Israeli women hole up in front-line trenches with men probably started with the fact that Israel is the only country in the world that drafts women…” They tried to integrate women into the Palmach, their most elite strike force, in the 1940’s. The commander of the unit told the women to keep a bullet or grenade for themselves. Don’t let them take you alive. But after a battle the ground was strewn with bodies. A number were female; mutilated in unspeakable ways. The Palmach leadership ended the policy of assigning women to combat (Kinder, Gentler Military, Gutmann, 264-5).
The pro-women in combat and anti-women writer Francke faces these issues head-on and dismisses them if not shrug them off. This is how I know the die is cast. There is no going back now as a society. Only God can bring this about either in grace or wrath. When Army doctor Rhonda Cornum was a POW in the First Gulf War. She was molested by her captors. But she speaks of it, as do the women who report on it, as Pro-Abortion people do now about life in the womb. “Yeah, we know it’s a baby, a person, and that we’re dismembering it in the mother’s womb. Deal with it”. “Cornum insisted her feelings of helplessness listening to [her fellow POW] being beaten were no different from his feelings when she was being molested on the truck. ‘I don’t think Troy liked it,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t like it when they beat him up, either ‘” (Ground Zero, Francke, 101).
This is really where my voyage into feminism began. Circa 1988 a member said indignantly to be: “If my daughter wants to go to the Airforce Academy, I want her to be able to.” Then around 1993 a confessional Lutheran pastor said the same thing to me about his daughter. In 1993 because the federal government allowed women to fly in combat, the Air Force adopted as part of their Survival, Evasion, Escape and Resistance (SERE) training, what they called “‘the rape scenario'”. After going through it in 1996, a female cadet filed suit against the USAF academy for sexual harassment and for destroying her “‘education, career, and self-esteem.'” But this isn’t the troubling part. The troubling part is that the reason the Airforce came up with “‘the rape scenario'” was to “‘desensitize” male soldiers to the screams of female soldiers (Kinder, Gentler Military, Gutmann, 130).
The gist of military basic training of young men is to transition them from viewing their mother as caregiver to one he should rightly defend. You break the mother-son bond in this way and it’s good for society. Break the mother-child bond of life-giver and she can become a taker too as in abortion. Break the mother-son by desensitizing the latter to the pain of females and you have barbarity. What father or mother wants that for a daughter or for a son?
[i] In order to get by “the science”, the Army tells you, at least it told me up till 1995, to engage in a doublethink. We were told in the 70s that the differing standards for the PT for men and women were not a double standard just different ones. “Public law 94-106 opening the academies to women [in 1975] was straightforward [says this author in favor of it]. Academy-bound men and women were required to meet the same standards for ‘appointment, admission, training, graduation, and commissioning.’ The only nod to gender in the law was allowing for ‘minimum essential adjustments’ in physical requirements because of the ‘physiological differences between male and female individuals.’” West Point particularly had to adjust physical training because the women couldn’t do it. They came up with the “’Doctrine of Comparable Training.’ Instead of male and female cadets being held to identical physical standards, the academy developed a formula of ‘equivalent effort’ to equalize the physiological differences between men and women. Male cadets had to compete the academy required indoor obstacle course in 3:30; women were allotted 5:30. Women received the same grade for completing 48 push-ups in two minutes as men did for 72, for running two miles in 14:46 as men in 12:43. Women’s abdominal muscles gave them a slight advantage. They had to perform 84 sit-ups within two minutes to get a B grade while men had to do 82” (Ground Zero, Francke, 195, 197). It’s no accident, that 2 1/2 years after the combat exclusion law was lifted in January 2013 that gay marriage was legalized in June 2015. Doublethink-ing is hard to learn but once learned it’s like falling through the looking glass. Everything looks different.
