Behold, your people are women in your midst! The gates of your land are opened wide to your enemies... (Nahum 3:13a)
(Tim, w/thanks to Bob P.) When the lion lies down with the lamb, we'll no longer need policemen or soldiers. Until then, we do. And it matters a great deal whether those policemen and soldiers are men or women. On many levels.
For starters, military women get pregnant...
And a pregnant woman, whether she knows she's pregnant or not, carries an innocent civilian into battle. This is a needless risk of human life that no civilized man should countenance. For this reason, Vern Poythress questions whether any war waged by the co-ed military of these United States can ever be moral. Minimizing the loss of life is foundational to historic just war criteria.
Moving on from there, we find a host of lesser concerns. Children left behind and even orphaned so Mommie can fight. Sexual violence in the theater of war. An almost complete loss of modesty between the sexes; and consequently, rampant sexual immorality and the attendant family breakdown, divorce, and murder that always accompany such immorality.
But we haven't yet mentioned the impact of the fairer and weaker sex on fighting itself and this is a discussion wild horses can't drag good reformed pastors and elders into. Can we train women to fix bayonets? Should we? Is our androgynous social revolution of such importance that we must sacrifice military preparedness to its ends? Should Christians work to support this revolution, or should we oppose it?
If there are certain deficiencies in women's physical and emotional abilities to kill, can we remove those deficiencies by putting them on testosterone?
If so, would they be good mothers when they returned from deployment? And their husbands: would they want their wife back if she arrived with a lower voice and a mustache? (You don't want to think such trivial concerns would have a deleterious effect on loving marriages, but lesser things have broken a home--like changing the drawer handle the kitchen towel hangs on.)
In the earlier post on the violent death of Don Belton, I pointed out that sodomites are determined to deny any connection between homosexual violence and murder. So too, androgynites are determined to deny any connection between sexuality itself and discipline, strength, courage, and a whole host of other things desirable in the military.
If you've read this far, here's an essay from a recent issue of the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy that you may want to read. Titled "Constructing the Co-ed Military," its author is Elaine Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness which is an independent, non-partisan public policy organization specializing in military personnel issues. Take some time and read it.
