Linda Hirshman:
On Thursday, the Pentagon released a report allowing a trickle more of estrogen into the front lines, with women now officially assigned, instead of informally attached, to battalions. But despite an explicit recommendation from a panel of neutral experts, still no ground fighting, no combat infantry, no special forces. In a press release, the women veterans’ Service Women’s Action Network “regretted” the failure to lift the “unfair” Combat Exclusion Policy, which precludes women from becoming infantry members.
Will they never learn? A year ago, the lame duck Congress finally voted an end to the despised exclusion of openly gay men and women from the service, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The same arguments – unit cohesion, unfitness for combat – that were used against open gay service now live on as the last barriers to women. For however many women are fit enough and inclined to take those hard-line jobs, as for the many dedicated gay and lesbian service members, the exclusions are an insurmountable barrier to their aspirations and a costly waste of human power for the country.
…But like the gay movement and marriage, feminism has mostly moved beyond the contention that women are morally superior or that war is always and incontestably wrong. If the society is sufficiently threatened, sometimes even liberal states must invoke the willingness to sacrifice, even life itself, for the good of the enterprise. At crucial times in Western history – classical Athens, revolutionary France – full military service was indistinguishable from citizenship itself. Why should women who can serve be excluded from this service to the state?
Merciless Mary, mother of Fuck. “If the society is sufficiently threatened.” Well, it’s not, so may we consider the rest of your blathering null and void? In fact, this particular society is downright threatening. I’m fairly sure I’ll make it to the end of my life without seeing a foreign enemy powerful enough to invade and occupy the lower 48, but I expect to see Uncle Sam setting up shop and constructing military bases in quite a few other far-flung regions of the world between now and then.
This is what I utterly despise about mainstream liberals. Like the Greenwald article stressed the other day, these scum are perfectly fine with unprecedented militarism as long as a member of their tribe is in command of it. Aggressive foreign policy is perfectly fine as long as the soldiers prosecuting it display the superficial diversity of a Benetton ad. Guilty white liberals who obsessively sanitize their language lest they grievously offend each other aren’t concerned at all with the actual death and destruction their nation causes elsewhere, and consider it the height of activism to agitate for everyone to have a chance to participate in it. Wherever there’s a fight so transgendered endomorphs can suit up in combat fatigues, they’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up an OWS protester, they’ll be there (cheering the cop on). Fuck every last one of them.
…adding, this seems tangentially related:
The US Navy named a new warship after Gabrielle Giffords on Friday, honoring the former Arizona lawmaker who survived a gunman’s bullet to the head a year ago.
…Mabus also said the ship’s sponsor would be Roxanna Green, the mother of a nine-year-old girl — Christina Taylor-Green — who was killed in the same shooting spree that left Giffords seriously wounded.
Under naval tradition, a sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
Well, of course. What better way to honor the victims of random individual violence than to bestow their names upon a massive instrument of state violence? There’s such a pleasing symmetry in imagining the spirit of little Christina guiding a warship on its way to help deal death to other, unimportant, nine year-old girls, wouldn’t you say?