Did you know? Congress has finally done it. Per a recent military spending bill, girls will now be automatically registered for the draft at 18. So desensitized to the real and noticeable average differences between men and women have we become that the news is not of note for most people or even, hard to believe, celebrated by some.
Writing for the Federalist, I invoke the wisdom of Phyllis Schlafly. One of the most underrated women of the 20th century, Schlafly saw the issues with absolute equality between the sexes under the law. If men and women are truly equal in every respect, there is no longer any meaningful objection to sending women to the frontlines of combat.
While reading “The Compleat Woman,” a book of interviews by a fairly progressive British journalist, I was struck by how often a committed feminist of the 1980s or, worse yet, a feminist man, made the claim that there is “no difference” between men and women. While professional capacities may in some arenas be comparable, that is a nonsensical claim. This unreflective commitment to feminist dogma does not a one of us any good. It is also the reason that I continue to reject the mantel of “feminism” despite continued claims of its necessity.
There are places in the world that oppress women. There are child brides and honor killings. Until a hundred years ago, women in the United States could not legally vote. Is the latter oppression on the same spectrum as the former? We know how the feminists feel about it, but I can say definitively that women’s suffrage did not and cannot constrain fanatics nor erase the real and identifiable differences between men and women. When we chose to forget that, we started down the road to now.
Although we like to claim mothers are “in the trenches,” too many of us have forgotten what combat is. For more on women and the draft, read the full article here.
