By Rev. Mark H. Creech
November 10, 2003

(AgapePress) - With Veterans Day only five days away, six Democratic presidential candidates squared off at a debate sponsored by Planned Parenthood and five other women's groups. The hot topic was whether 18-year-old women should be required to register for the draft. According to an Associated Press article, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, and former Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun said women should not be required to register. But Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark "agreed that draft registration for women was necessary to set the nation on the path toward true equality for women."

Are these men, who would be Commander-In-Chief, so henpecked by feminists they've forgotten the Supreme Court ruled in Rostker v. Goldberg that women could constitutionally be exempted from the draft because draft registration, conscription, and military combat are all one continuum? The High Court made its ruling on the basis that any military draft is for the purpose of raising combat troops. I don't think America is ready, nor do I hope she will ever be ready for a time when the obvious eternal differences between the genders are no longer recognized and women are readily sent into combat.

The purpose of the armed forces is to defend the United States of America. When General Douglas MacArthur delivered his powerful commencement speech, "Duty, Honor, Country" at West Point, he told cadets: "Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication ... you are the ones trained to fight ... yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed." MacArthur continued by saying that the soldiers place therefore is "slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads ... blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain ... in the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts ... the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails." Are presidential candidates Kerry, Dean, and Clark actually suggesting we tear women away from their babies and keeping their families together to send them into this hell?

We're already seeing the complications that arise out of this kind of policy. Just last week, reservist Simone Holcomb refused an order to return to duty in Iraq because it would have meant losing two of her seven children in a custody battle. It appears a judge ruled that either Simone or her husband, Sgt. First Class Vaughn Holcomb, who had also been ordered to Iraq, must remain home or lose custody of two of the children from Vaughn's previous marriage. Simone's superiors have told her she is AWOL and risking discharge or imprisonment. But she says, "For me to get on a plane and abandon my children would be against the law ... and I don't know how any parent on Earth could leave without knowing how they're going to be taken care of." Granted, Holcomb has made a voluntary commitment to the U.S. military she ought to keep. Yet I don't blame her as much as I do the gender-benders, the radical feminists, who have used the American military to socially engineer something that is not only unnatural, but immoral -- requiring women leave their children to go off to war!

Of course, many will point to the supposedly heroic actions of Jessica Lynch to bolster the feminization of the U.S. military. Nevertheless, the 20-year-old private recently told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a Primetime interview that she was deeply bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal. Lynch was reported to have fought off her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffered knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn't shot, but was hurt after a rocket-propelled grenade hit her Humvee utility vehicle and crashed into another vehicle. Lynch told Sawyer she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she said. "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing .... I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember .... They used me to symbolize all this stuff," she said. Indeed they did! Jessica Lynch is the poster girl for promoting the Pentagon's policy of acquiesces to feminists' longtime, self-proclaimed goal of an androgynous society.

I confess I'm indignant! Is chivalry completely dead? Are men such wimps today that none are outraged enough to rise up and defend their wives, their sweethearts, their daughters, against those who would send them into harm's way? Advocating women register for the draft is a life-threatening -- as well as a family-threatening -- danger to every young girl who is of draft age now or in the future. We cannot possibly know what the future holds in terms of war or a reinstated draft that would require involuntary conscription of young women.

In her 1992 testimony before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Services, Phyllis Schlafly admonished: "We hear the constant refrain that 'times have changed,' but there is no change whatsoever in obvious facts of human nature, such as that men and women differ in so many important ways, that healthy young women are apt to get pregnant, and that there is a profound difference between male-to-male bonding and male-to-female bonding -- a factor that can make the difference between life and death on the battlefield. No matter what social changes are alleged to have taken place, the policies of our U.S. armed forces should respect the dignity and value of marriage and motherhood."

Although I profoundly respect all women who have served in our nation's military admirably, to require women register for the draft is not only uncivilized but also degrading to women and a serious attack on family integrity.