I WAS away from home yesterday. I will be posting the many comments I received in response to recent entries shortly.

DANIEL S. writes:

In Poland the legislative body voted down draft legislation that would allow for the legal recognition of homosexual civil unions. This means of course that Poland will come under even more pressure from the American government and Soros-funded NGOs to jettison its Catholic tradition and accept “human rights” and the open society to usher in the reign of abortion on demand, homosexuality, and other sacred cows of cultural Marxism and American liberalism.

The Russian Duma has been even more proactive in opposing the homosexual agenda. They took their first legislative steps toward banning homosexual propaganda and public expressions of support for homosexual “rights.” Expect the media in America and Europe to ratchet up their efforts to demonize Vladimir Putin as a ruthless, reactionary autocrat who stands in the way of democracy and human rights.

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HERE’S YET another of the many unexamined consequences of the planned entry of women into combat — one of the dumbest and most despicable ideas ever proposed by the American government.

Ryan Smith, who served in Iraq as a Marine infantrymen, writes in the Wall Street Journal that placing men and women together in war conditions will cause shame and embarrassment. Of course you don’t have to be a veteran to know this. Anyone who has watched a few war movies with his common sense intact knows how ridiculous and unnatural it would be to have men and women live in battlefield conditions together or to expect women to relieve themselves on the battlefield as easily as men do.

Smith writes:

Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.

Despite the professionalism of Marines, it would be distracting and potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene. In the reverse, it would be painful to witness a member of the opposite sex in such an uncomfortable and awkward position. Combat effectiveness is based in large part on unit cohesion. The relationships among members of a unit can be irreparably harmed by forcing them to violate societal norms.

Smith does not even mention the obvious fact that hygiene for women is much more complicated.

TEXANNE writes:

While searching the Internet for coverage of the Walk for Life, I found this inauguration photo.

The Obamas’ iconic fists brought back memories of the protests that overwhelmed my college campus — and the nation at large — during the cultural upheaval of 1968-69.

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AT VFR, Henry McCulloch writes:

I have had many years to think about what role women should have in the armed forces. I was a Marine infantry officer and Air Force Reserve fighter pilot in an active capacity for over 16 years. Now, mercifully, I am completely separated from the U.S. armed forces.

During my active service and in the years since it ended, I have seen women over-preferred and over-promoted at every step. Inevitably their presence in any numbers is burdensome to the force and detrimental to combat readiness—even when serving only in support units. No matter what promises about high standards Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey may make, standards will be lowered until enough women qualify that this great social experiment can be declared a success. But the truth will be otherwise and, should the U.S. armed forces have to fight a serious adversary that does not engage in this nonsense, very quickly obvious. Men, and some of these ladies, will pay for this social engineering with their lives.

In the 1970s, I saw the service academies thrown open to women, and male cadets and midshipmen at all three academies ordered not to tell the press anything about the blatant dual standards that prevailed thenceforth—despite command assurances to the public that no standards were being relaxed to accommodate women. Read More »

AS I SAID in the previous post, there are so many unexamined consequences of the Obama administration’s decision to place women in combat — a decision that has been in the works for many years and that is the logical extension of the radical equality embraced by most Americans — that one barely knows where to begin. But here is perhaps the most serious consequence: Children will lose their mothers in war.

Not only will more young children stand at military airports waving their mothers tearful and uncomprehending goodbyes, but more children will receive the news that their mothers have died violent deaths. Some will learn that their mothers were raped or dismembered.

It is a great hardship for a child to lose a father in war. But when he loses a father who has fought for his country, he at least gains a hero. A heroic, absent father can give strength. A heroic, absent mother weakens. No normal child will be comforted by a mother’s medals. Every child wants a mother who is a loving presence. The idea of a mother as a warrior is an unthinkable abomination. Given the high rate of illegitimacy, women soldiers will not always have husbands, which means that some children will lose their only parent in combat.

The woman soldier represents perhaps the supreme offense against the values of maternity. Thus, leaving aside the fact that some mothers will be killed, the approval of military aggression in women will further damage these values in general, turning women who will never see combat into poor, unfit mothers.

In hailing the novelty of sending mothers to war, Obama has advanced by one giant leap his ongoing war against the young and civilization itself. A country with women soldiers will create children who feel betrayed. A country with women soldiers will create feral, dehumanized children.

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Theodore Roosevelt, March 13, 1905

No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind, and character, and numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.

There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmate, the housewife, and mother….

Barack Obama, January 24, 2013

Today, by moving to open more military positions—including ground combat units—to women, our armed forces have taken another historic step toward harnessing the talents and skills of all our citizens. This milestone reflects the courageous and patriotic service of women through more than two centuries of American history and the indispensable role of women in today’s military. Many have made the ultimate sacrifice, including more than 150 women who have given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan—patriots whose sacrifices show that valor knows no gender.

Earlier today I called Secretary of Defense Panetta to express my strong support for this decision, which will strengthen our military, enhance our readiness, and be another step toward fulfilling our nation’s founding ideals of fairness and equality. …. Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love.

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Sometimes a picture does say it best. Here is a photograph of Gen. Martin Dempsey and Leon Panetta shaking hands after consummating the feminist conquest of the U.S. armed forces. Note who has been carefully selected to oversee the two old white men as they do their duty; there is nothing coincidental about photo-ops such as these. ‘Nuff said.

WESLEY PRUDEN blames Pentagon careerists whose primary objective is not military.

AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat critiques the inauguration outfits of Michelle Obama. Kidist writes:

It is interesting that these [fashion] designers want a powerful, militaristic Michelle, yet also want her to look innocuously feminine (almost like a small girl), as though to sartorially dampen the former with the latter. And Michelle obliges.

Women who embrace aggression often instinctively resort to the ultra-feminine to temper it. The modern woman is both hyper-man and hyper-woman.

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THERE ARE so many unexamined consequences of the full integration of women into the military that one barely knows where to start, but one of the obvious places is with the fact that the Armed Forces will be increasingly in the business of population control. Pregnant women cannot be deployed.

See this article at Reuters about the many “unintended pregnancies” of servicewomen. According to the piece:

Just over ten percent of women in the military said in 2008 they’d had an unintended pregnancy in the last year – a figure significantly higher than rates in the general public, according to a new study.

Of course, the designation of “unintended” is entirely absurd. All pregnancies are in some sense intended. Human beings cannot reproduce without some degree of intention. However, in this case, “unintended” is simply a term assigned by the woman herself. It essentially means “inconvenient.” But what is inconvenient for a career is not necessarily inconvenient for a woman personally. In other words, the woman’s designation of “unintended” can never be entirely clarified or known by a survey. From the article:

Dr. Daniel Grossman from the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on the study, called the rates of unintended pregnancy “really shocking.”

“Women in the military certainly deserve more than that. This needs to be addressed across all branches of the military,” he said.

So the pregnant woman is now a victim of the military. In addition to providing rations and equipment, troops in combat will need ample supplies of contraceptives — and under this mentality, it will be the military’s responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Given that pregnancies can be, even in the best of circumstances, “unintended,” a woman who becomes pregnant on tour after her unit runs out of birth control pills or condoms will now have cause to blame the military for her offspring’s existence. We will almost certainly see women suing the Army for damages after “unintended” pregnancy. And as a consequence, the military will need to become more and more involved in the effective sterilization of their female troops.

As I said before, women don’t join the military as equals of men in order to defend their country. They join it to destroy their country.  An egalitarian military must embrace socially destructive ideals. What can be more emblematic of our times than a military unit equipped with guns to destroy the enemy and contraceptives to destroy future soldiers?  We have lost both the will to fight and the will to live.

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Sir Thomas More, Hans Holbein, the Younger

DON VINCENZO writes:

The most senior Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, is in the news again, but this time not on the basis of a blistering dissent in a Court decision, or some commentary he made about a contentious issue. In fact, the current controversy centers on not what he wrote, but what he wore. Read More »

DEFENSE Secretary Leon Panetta will announce later this week that thousands of combat positions will be opened to women, starting this year, according to senior officials at the Pentagon who informed the Associated Press of the news. The AP reports: “This decision could open more than 230,000 jobs, many in Army and Marine infantry units, to women.”

This is the Obama second term, hitting its stride. The Pentagon has been preparing for placing women more prominently on the front lines for years, at the urging of a small minority of military women, but the process will now be speeded up. For all their rhetoric about the interests of women and the war against women, liberals are happy to see women at war. Mothers who leave their children to go off to war, something all civilized societies have rejected, receive their approval. They have no instinctive revulsion at the sight of a woman in uniform wielding a gun. In fact, the idea of a woman with a gun — and a fantastic military career — is exciting. One can only assume, given this new freedom for women, that they will never be excluded from the draft again. There is absolutely no working principle left for excluding them from mandatory service.

This is the American woman. The effect on the national psyche is immense. Even women who will never serve in the Army will be affected. We are a nation of women warriors.

Scott Olson, Getty Images

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IN OBSERVANCE of yesterday’s 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Kate Manning writes about the many gruesome things, such as throwing themselves down stairs and ingesting lye, that women did to themselves to kill their unborn children in the days before legal abortion.

One can have sympathy for the women who thought they could not endure giving birth or having a child and suffered for it, and yet also realize that the Back-Alley Argument for legal abortion, employed here by Manning, is extremely weak. It is shocking how prevalent it is.

Manning fails to note that whatever horrors these women inflicted on themselves, they typically had more severe consequences for the fetuses involved. The same holds true of legal abortion. It is a procedure that always ends in one fatality. Also, these women generally were not forced to injure themselves. Before there was legal, clinical abortion, many women resolved their distress over an expected pregnancy the easy way: by giving birth. The Back-Alley Abortion Argument presumes there is no way out. Third, there has always been a fail-safe way to avoid pregnancy itself. It’s called chastity, which has many positive benefits. Finally, Manning fails to note that women have been physically and psychologically harmed by legal abortion. See the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer’s explanation of how abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer.  Aside from the depression women often experience after abortion, there are indirect psychological consequences. Abortion has loosened the ties and interdependence between man and woman, exposing both to soul-crushing emptiness.

Pregnancy is never simply a physical event. It is a spiritual event too.

At the blog Like Mother, Like Daughter, Leila also writes about the Roe v. Wade anniversary:

Know that when you raise your children to love and respect marriage by treating their own bodies as a temple of the Holy Spirit, you are fighting abortion with all your might. Every watchful, protective moment you spend guarding your children’s purity is a blow against the scourge of abortion.

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ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and “lectured [her] on the superiority of Muslims to Christians.”

The principles of ecumenism put forth at Vatican II lead with irrevocable logic to teaching Catholics how to be good Muslims.

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TIBERGE at Galliawatch reports on François Hollande’s reaction to the huge rally ten days ago against marriage rights for homosexuals. According to Le Figaro:

[O]n substance, the president will not give in at all. No chance that he will erase the word marriage from the law and replace it with civil union, as the representatives for the Manif pour Tous are demanding. Nor does he have the slightest intention to hold a referendum demanded by the Right. “He will reaffirm his determination to pass the law. The principle will not change,” insists a spokesman for Elysée.

HOW LONG did it take Obama to mention slavery in his inaugural address? He restrained himself. He waited until the fifth paragraph. How long did it take him to mention the greedy rich? Twelfth paragraph. And the mothers, daughters and wives in chains because they do not make as much money as men? That was way down there: nineteenth. As were our enlightened forebears at Stonewall.

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