User: Kealii

WOW!!

THANK YOU, Laurie, for voicing your opinion!

Yes, I totally agree about the distinction between equal and identical. And about home-making being an honorable career choice for women. I once came across a debate somewhere on something like sex education or home schooling (can't remember exactly), where some lunatic said in all seriousness that raising kids is not the job of the parents but of the schools!! I should've bookmarked it or saved the URL, to prove that I'm not making this up. How did we get to this point?

The amount of respect given to the unique abilities and roles of the two sexes should be the same, not the roles themselves. Males and females have different types of bodies and different types of brains. Real biological differences.

Consider the physical differences. I remember my first enrollment at a gym. I wasn't exactly the proverbial 97-pound weakling, but I was pretty skinny, yet I started benchpressing at a weight well above what most females were doing. The women were not as far behind in lower body strength (no surprise: God gave women strong legs for pregnancy). But the men were much stronger in upper body strength (God gave men strong arms, abs and pecs to provide for and to protect women).

What about mental differences? Contrary to what radical feminists would have everyone believe, it is not all learned or shaped by society or some evil patriarchy. It begins at an astonishingly early age. Somebody did an experiment where newborns were placed happily in a room with their mothers. Then a physical barrier was placed between parent and child. The boys cried at first, then reacted physically, with aggression, trying to break or find a way around the barrier. The girls reacted by using their crying to communicate their plight.

I believe the unique abilities of, and differences between, males and females make it permissible, in some cases, to treat men and women differently. Men and women can and should have slightly different legal rights and responsibilities and differing social privileges and obligations that take these differences into account. I enjoy my privilege as a man to expose my chest in public while women can't, but I also accept my obligation as a man to expose that chest to enemy bullets during a wartime draft while women can choose to remain safely at home. It's fair that only we can go shirtless because men have traditionally done the hard, dirty, and sweaty outside work where you can't let the heat of a summers day fatigue you into making dangerous mistakes. It's fair that only we have to go to war because only women can breast feed and give birth.

Females in combat leads to threats against women's rights and lives, because the enemy, either foreign or domestic, starts viewing females as combatants and targets.

Yup. Gives terrorists an additional excuse not to feel guilty about chosing civilian targets.

And I gotta admit, as a girl, it IS a very nice privilege to know that having to go fight a war is NOT a possibility for my future!!

Sadly, future generations of girls may not be so lucky:

http://maxgoss.worldmagblog.com/maxgoss/archives/009947.html

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041022-120846-1796r.htm

And within this framework, in most cases, when boys/men get a good dose of loving, nurturing, affectionate female care, any feeling of unfairness about a male-only draft usually melts away!! ...and then these boys/men KNOW that it would be INSANE to send these tender, fragile girls/women into military combat!!

Indeed.

When I first learned about the draft as a preteen boy, some years before my first girlfriend, it bothered me that women didn't even have to register for the draft. I forgot about the whole issue until sometime after 9/11. I remember lying on the couch late one night with my girlfriend. The radio was on and they were talking about the attacks and the possibility of a draft. Apparently, some young draft age males were whining about the fact that women were exempt from the draft. One even said something to the effect of "it's about time females came home in body bags".

At first, I was stunned. Then sickened. I looked at Andrea, curled up on the couch with me, sleeping. This ... I refuse to call him a man ... wanted to see my lovely girlfriend forcibly sent to war, where she'd risk being maimed, raped and killed. I looked at my girlfriend's innocent angelic face, ran my hands gently over her tender life-nourishing bosom and her belly thinking about the life-making womb inside, and on the verge of tears wondered if any of them had draft age girlfriends, wives, sisters or female cousins. How would he like his girlfriend being forced to go to war and come back with shrapnel embedded in her face, or have one or two of her breasts obliterated by a .50 caliber round, or raped and abused so badly she can never have children?

Perhaps one thing our schools (you know, the ones who are supposed to raise our kids?) could do is make viewing the first part of Saving Private Ryan mandatory for seniors or juniors. All the young men should write a short essay on whether they think women should be drafted and sent into that kind of combat. They should also be made to think about the draft itself. Maybe conduct a mock lottery based on their birthdays like a real draft. Those guys who get "drafted" might be assigned the name of an American killed in Vietnam and told to find out something about who he was and what happened to him. The girls maybe could write letters of appreciation or give flowers to the guys who were "drafted".

:If you don't think young women should be "cannon fodder", why should young men be?

Well, ideally there wouldn't be war. Ideally, nobody should be cannon fodder. Ideally, the military would forever be all-volunteer. I'm not saying we should have a draft now or anytime in the foreseable future. All I'm saying is that IF and when we need a draft for ground combat troops, it is better to restrict this burden to men only.

re: the lost generation of WWI

IMHO, WWI shows why we should NOT draft women for combat.

Yes, it's sad that so many millions of young men with their whole lives ahead of them got their chests ripped open by machine guns, blown to smitherines by artilery shells, or choked on poison gas.

In spite of all that, the population recovered in a few generations. In WWII, America lost more than half a million men, but it was followed by the largest population boom up until then.

After a war, the survivors try to make up for the losses. If half the men are killed, the other half may have 3 or 4 babies instead of 2. In more primitive societies where infant mortality is high, the men may even resort to polygamy. The Yanomamo in South America do this. Almost a third of adult males are killed in wars, raids, and murders. Yet, for thousands of years they survived in this near constant state of warfare.

A woman can have only a handful of children in her lifetime, but one man can impregnate thousands of females. Obviously, it's not ideal from a genetic diversity standpoint to have only one male for every hundred females, but it gets the job done. OTOH, if you have only one female for every hundred males your society is finished.

An alternative to polygamy is to start having children before going to war. I think in the Seven Samurai, the night before the village is invaded, the men are told to go home and have sex with their wives, and they all burst into laughter. But there's a serious point here. A man can get his wive pregnant before being killed and the couple can still produce a child. But if a woman get pregnant and then dies, the child dies with her. This may have been the idea behind the marriage and fatherhood exemptions in the Vietnam draft - give the guy a chance to do his reproductive duty.

Yet another alternative is to use a sperm bank. Many of our soldiers have already used this approach when called up for duty in the Middle East. You could have egg banks for the women, but if she dies you still need to find a surrogate womb for that egg.

So, there are at least three ways to address the population reproduction issue: 1) increased # of offspring by the survivors (if not too many die); 2) polygamy; 3) reproduce before going to war; 4) sperm banks.

Note that #'s 2, 3, and 4 will not work if you allow young women to be killed in large numbers on the battlefield.

Hmmm. As of today, it looks like almost HALF (45%) of women would get pregnant to get out of the draft!!

I don't think we should have a draft right now.

But if they do bring back a draft, it should be just men, at least for combat. Women can do desk jobs, stateside, and maybe some support jobs, but you obviously can't put a pregnant woman on the front line!

It just goes to show that The Bible is correct, that men and women have different roles in life. Women bring the next generation into being and men make sure that this all happens in a safe and protected environment. It's not a question of fighting ability. Many women can fight as well as a man.

But when a women gets pregnant, she has to carry that child for 9 months. I think the tour of duty for draftees is 2 years. It's also kind of a good idea if she could be allowed to breast feed the infant for about a year.

But even if you don't allow her to nurse her newborn child, who will look after the baby while she's off to war? The men are fighting, too. Think also about the impact on these men, the ones fighting on the front lines.

Would you fight your best worrying about your drafted girlfriend getting her guts sliced open by a bayonet or her breasts shredded by automatic gunfire?

It's bad enough when a man gets drafted and his girlfriend back home stays up nights worried sick that a bullet will find its way into his heart.

But at least her insomnia won't get in the way of his unit's fighting ability. Think also about the symbolic message we send to the enemy.

Many of our enemies and potential enemies have rather conservative views about the role of females in society.

But don't blame them too much for it. When you are just barely surviving, the life of every child, and everyone who can give birth to a child becomes the most precious thing. That's why women were traditionally stayed at home while the men did all the dangerous jobs.

Putting our young women in harms way is like we're flaunting our wealth in the enemy's face (probably one of the reasons they hate us in the first place). Also, forcing our young females to become cannon fodder suggests that we're willing to sacrifice those who hold our future in their wombs.

In short, it means that we don't care about our own survival!