The draft has been a controversial issue in the US for the last century. With talk of enforcing “equal right” and “equal access” for men as well as women in society, and with the increasing push for another major foreign war, a federal judge has ruled that men as well as women can be drafted according to a report:
A federal judge has ruled that a men-only draft is unconstitutional, but he stopped short of ordering the Selective Service System to register women for military service.
The Houston judge sided with a San Diego men’s advocacy group that challenged the government’s practice of having only men sign up for the draft, citing sex discrimination in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
“This case balances on the tension between the constitutionally enshrined power of Congress to raise armies and the constitutional mandate that no person be denied the equal protection of the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gray Miller of the Southern District of Texas.
The lawsuit was filed in 2013 against the Selective Service System by Texas resident James Lesmeister, who later added San Diego resident Anthony Davis and the San Diego-based National Coalition for Men as additional plaintiffs.
The two men had standing to sue the government because they were within the age range of 18 to 26 in which men in the United States are required to register with Selective Service.
Coalition attorney Marc Angelucci said in a statement on Saturday that he is pleased with the court decision.
“Forcing only males to register is an aspect of socially institutionalized male disposability and helps reinforce the stereotypes that support discrimination against men in other areas” such as divorce, child custody and domestic violence services, Angelucci said.
“Women are now allowed in combat, so this decision is long overdue,” he added. “After decades of sex discrimination against men in the Selective Service, the courts have finally found it unconstitutional to force only men to register.”
The government asked the judge to dismiss the suit or stay a decision until a national commission studying the issue of women’s draft registration reaches a recommendation.
The judge noted that could take years, and even then Congress isn’t required to follow the commission’s findings.
“Congress has been debating the male-only registration requirement since at least 1980,” Miller wrote.
The government pointed to a 1981 U.S. Supreme Court decision that the Military Selective Service Act was constitutional as written, to exclude women, because women restricted from combat were not offered similar opportunities that men had.
Miller found that reasoning no longer applicable, since the Department of Defense lifted all gender-based restrictions on military service — including combat roles — in 2015.
The judge likewise disagreed with the government’s position that drafting women would be an administrative burden and that far more women than men will be found physically unfit for service after being drafted.
Congress has expressed few concerns about female physical ability, but did focus more on societal consequences of drafting young mothers to go off to war, Miller said.
“If there was ever a time to discuss ‘the place of women in the Armed Services,’ that time has passed,” Miller concluded. (source, source)
Now this “men’s rights” organization says this is a good thing in the name of enforcing “fairness.”
It is true that there is a lot of abuse of men today by women from the legal system, as the current body of laws enacted slowly throughout the 20th century, but especially during the 1960s has resulted in a case where women are legally favored to the legally enforced detriment of men. This is easily reflected through the divorce statistics, where a minimum of 70% of divorces are initiated by women and men are overwhelmingly forced to pay money to their former spouses at often times what are arbitrary rates not related to their actual incomes, as divorce settlements are not based on actual income proportions, but on what a judge rules he believes a man “should” be able to earn. The result of this and other laws has been the creation of several generations of broken, angry, sad men who hold serious resentment against women and do not want to remarry or if single and never married, who do not want to get married, and it in understandable why.
However, two wrongs do not make a bad decision right. This is not a ruling for “men’s rights,” for the simple reason that women should not be on the battlefield in the first place. This division of labor is shown throughout history, where the men fight and the women minds the homes and domestic affairs in society. This is not to say that women cannot fight, or that men must go to war and cannot stay at home. It is to express a paradigm that reflects throughout history in all cultures for all times.
When the Spanish went to Mexico, it was not a mixed-gender army of Spanish soldiers, and when the Aztecs went to war with the Spanish, it was not a mixed gender army that confronted them. It was the Spanish men versus the Aztec men, and the Spanish men won. It was not the multi-gendered armies of Mohammed who spread out across the deserts and established and empire stretching from Tours to the Taklamakian desert, but successive armies of men from the many races and tribes throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia.
This pattern remains constant throughout history. Women, while they have and can fight, overwhelmingly as a paradigm do not fight because while there are exceptions, exceptions are not the rule, and the general rule is that men are stronger, more aggressive, and more able to perform the tasks of war successfully in comparison to any woman.
What the “women’s rights” movement has done is evil, but one should not think that the “men’s rights” movement is an answer to the situation because in many ways, it simply demands the same as the women’s rights movement but in a masculinized context. It is, for the purposes of comparison, similar to the debate between International Socialism a.k.a. Communism, and National Socialism. The former is not “cured” by the latter, but morphs into a slightly different form in appearance while retaining all of and to that, the same potency as the “enemy” it is supposedly fighting.
The answer to the situation of intentionally provoked inter-gender violence is the Catholic Faith and her teaching on the distinguished roles of men and women, which are equal in dignity but not in function and complimentary. It is not about “forcing” people into submission, but about acknowledging the inherent paradigm that distinguished between the two and working within it. This is something that even pagans do because while imperfect, as the Faith teaches, the natural law is in the hearts of all men even though they lack a complete understanding or proper execution of it.
While the judge has not required women to sign up for the “Selective Service” that men have to, the precedent has been established to allow it. It is dangerous and uncharitable to put women into a war zone for many reasons, it will result in many unnecessary deaths and abuses. To say that this needs to be done in the name of “fairness” for men is just as abusive as what the “feminist” movement did to men in a domestic way, and forms of tit-for-tat retribution such as this solve nothing except to worsen an already bad situation.
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