I’ll probably be returning to this subject along the way, I’ve written about it before, but now I’m writing a paper on this for one of my classes at Axia.

An article entitled “The Feminist Assault on our Military by David Horowitz, from National Review Online, October 5, 1992 illustrates how it came about.

There are many purposes behind the feminists’ efforts to restructure the military, but you can be sure that greater national security is not one of them.

Naturally, national security is something leftists are aiming to completely destroy, which I talked about on this post about the ACLU.

David Horowitz spells it out very clearly in this article: Democrat feminist Pat Schroeder, a feminist legislator on the Armed Services Committee at the time, was an anti-war activist before entering the House. Her lobbying was one of the reasons that more people paid a price for Tailhook than should have in a reasonable world. Read the rest of his article for more on that, because I’m going in a slightly different direction here. It was the beginning, however, of America’s military kow towing to political correctness and the set up creating a social experiment; for gender norming and changing physical test requirements to accommodate women in the military, in part.

Horowitz makes an interesting admission in this article which should be very telling about the leftist anti-war radicals of today:

When New Left radicals, like myself, launched the movement against the war in Vietnam, we did not say we wanted the Communists to win—which we did. We said we wanted to bring the troops home, which accomplished our objective: the Communists won. With disastrous consequences for Vietnam and the world.

Examples of this kind of double agenda abound in the current feminist campaign and can be found in testimony before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. Maria Lepowsky, a professor of Women’s Studies, provided the commissioners with data to support a combat role for women. Then Professor Lepowsky asked herself: “What would be some possible consequences …. if women were put in combat—on American cultural values and American society … ?” She answered her own question: “I think there might be increased concern about committing troops to combat, also perhaps a good thing.”

In other words, Professor Lepowsky was advocating that women be put in combat roles because to do so would make it more difficult to commit troops to combat. Now this is a kind of candor that is unusual for the Left.

Emphasis mine. Radical feminism has slowly taken a foothold in America’s military warrior culture, for the sake of a sense of ‘equality’ that will never be reached.

Chicks rule! For proof of that, just look at the movies coming out of Hollywood, or ask Rosie O’Donnell. GI Jane, Lara Croft, Kill Bill, Mr. And Mrs. Smith help alter the old perceptions of women we previously might have considered mothers and homemakers.

Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old file clerk, was assigned convoy duty in Iraq, and the convoy was attacked by a group of Saddam’s Fayedeen, notorious in Iraq for their cruelty, a killing squad. Lynch barely survived. Her friends, Lori Piestewa and Shoshona Johnson, who were cooks, didn’t.

“In the case of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, a different motivation was involved. It was not only the families of the female soldiers in the 507th Maintenance Company who were shocked that they would be placed in harms way. The disgust and horror that Americans in their living rooms registered when they found out that women were being killed, captured, and possibly tortured by the Iraqis would redound harshly on those who were responsible for placing America’s women at risk in a combat zone. Not only was America sending women into a combat zone, but two were single mothers with toddler children. America would be outraged at this situation. Who would be held responsible? Not just the radical feminists, but the senior military officers, congressmen and women, and Executive Branch civilians who had implemented the Clintons’ agenda to ‘feminize’ our armed forces would feel the wrath of the American people for what happened to Pvt. Jessica Lynch.

A way had to be found to ‘fuzz’ the realization that our female soldiers were being killed, captured and possibly tortured in Iraq. The way out was to immediately create a myth - the myth of the Modern American War Hero.” (Atkinson, 2003)

Michael Spann’s injuries from his torture in Afghanistan in comparison to what we know of Lynch’s injuries sustained in Iraq, and the similarities are striking.(Atkinson, 2003)

“Spann’s body would bear out the worst of the rumors - he had been captured alive and tortured by the AQ. Both of his legs had been broken below the knees in a typical al Qaida torture method. What was not reported was that he had been alive for quite some time after. Two bullets had been placed in the small of his back, on either side of his spine.” (Moore, 2003)

Jessica Lynch’s injuries were very similar to those of Johnny Spann. The Marines found a torture chamber in the basement of the first hospital she’d been held captive in for ‘lying’. Her legs were broken in four places, a customary method of torture by Saddam’s Fedayeen.(Atkinson, 2003)
The American public should be made fully aware of the implications; even if a soldier’s military occupational specialty is that of a file clerk (as Lynch’s was), or a cook, as Johnson and Piestewa were, or any other support MOS, their lives could end up unnecessarily at risk because of disastrous policies to further the feminist agenda.

Although studies show that the average woman is a fraction of the size of a man, and her total body strength is 60% or so of that of a man (Fleck and Kraemer, 2004), if a woman like Lynch were in a position where she had to pull a 180-lb man out of a humvee wreck with his 25-pound body armor, and his 75-pound battle rattle and another 25 pounds of communication gear, could she do it? Lynch measures just 5’4” tall and weighs in at 100-pounds.

Gender differences are acknowledged in sports like football, competitive weightlifting, and construction crews, but have been totally wiped out of existence when it comes to the military. The ‘combat exclusion rule’, which began during the Clinton administration in 1993, meant that woman can now be assigned to combat aviation and ships, as well as ‘high risk jobs’ near combat zones. Gender norming helped lower the standards on physical tests in order to accommodate women.

The military’s purpose is to defend our nation from enemies both foreign and domestic. We should not allow the cultural Marxist forces to further corrupt it in an attempt to carry out their counter-culture revolution.

“Like Marxism, feminism can explain everything from advertising to religion by following its single thread, the oppression of women.” (Iannone, 1989)

This concept reduces military readiness and our capability of winning wars.

References

Atkinson, Gerald, “Private Jessica Lynch’s Army: The Clinton Legacy”, July, 2003 retrieved on May 27, 2007 from http://www.newtotalitarians.com/JessicaLynchsArmy.html

Iannone, C. “The Feminist Confusion,” Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties eds. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1989), P. 149.

Moore, Robin, “The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger, On the Ground with the Special Forces in Afghanistan, Random House, pp. 173, 2003.