Judge Overturns Army’s Affirmative Action Promotion Policy

In March a federal judge ruled unconstitutional an U.S. Army policy that gave preferential treatment in promotion to women and minorities.

The Army’s written policy urged promotion boards to consider “past personal or institutional discrimination” when considering candidates for promotion. A white, male officer passed over for promotion in 1996 and 1997 sued, arguing that the policy was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

In his ruling, Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth noted that the Army had failed to establish that women and minorities had been discriminated against in the past during promotions. He cited statistics noting that since the 1970s the promotion rate for white and black officers had been almost identical.

“This [policy] undeniably establishes a preference in favor of one race or gender over another, and therefore is unconstitutional,” Lamberth wrote in his 68-page opinion.

The Army has not yet decided whether it will appeal, but since Lamberth framed his ruling very similar to Supreme Court decisions striking down affirmative action programs, overturning the verdict on appeal would be a long shot at best.

And imagine that — the Army having to judge people as individuals based on merit instead of based on their particular group membership. How will the nation ever survive such a radical notion?

Source:

Judge halts an army policy on promotion. Neely Tucker, Washington Post, March 5, 2002.

Terrorism, Sexuality and Robin Morgan

Joelle Cowan wrote an article back in December about, of all things, “The Sexuality of Terrorism.” This was not Cowan’s invention, but rather the title of a course being offered by the Department of Women’s Studies at California State University. As Cowan puts it,

Most people never imagined that terrorism had anything to do with sexuality, but that’s not what those who study women think. But according to their materials, it would be more accurate to say that terrorism has a nationality, one that sounds a lot like American [sic].

The course is partially based on Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. Morgan’s thesis isn’t hard to predict. Cowan quotes her as writing that, “The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world.”

Here’s a more extended bit of psychobabble from The Demon Lover,

The majority of terrorists-and those against whom they are rebelling-are men. The explosions going off today worldwide have been smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse. The terrorist has been the subliminal idol of an androcentric cultural heritage from prebiblical times to the present. His mystique is the latest version of the Demon Lover. He evokes pity because he lives in death. He emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration. He excites the thrill of fear. He is the essential challenge to tenderness. He is at once a hero of risk and an antihero of mortality.

And, of course, no feminist discussion of war could proceed without an assertion that war is simply sex by other means. According to Morgan,

A lack of ambivalence must be trained into a man. Can it ever be trained out of him? The war toy, the rigid penetrating missiles, the dynamite and the blasting cap-these are at first only symbols of the message he must learn, fetishes of the ecstasy he is promised. But he must become them before he is rewarded with what the lack of ambivalence promises him: a frenzy, an excitement, an exhilaration-an orgasmic thrill in violent domination with which, he is taught, no act of lovemaking could possibly compete.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Morgan’s publisher rushed a new version of The Demon Lover to press, and Morgan wrote an article on how the United States should respond to the attacks. Of course, any hint of supporting a war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan was strictly off the table. Instead, Morgan urged her readers to,

Talk about the root causes of terrorism , about the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people’s despair over ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need to address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; the need to arouse that most subversive of emotions — empathy — for “the other”; the need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious fundamentalisms of every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose the mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement, eroticism, and “manhood”; the need to comprehend that violence differs in degree but is related in kind, that it thrives along a spectrum, as do its effects — from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an entire populace living in fear.

Yeah, Mohammad Atta was probably turning in his grave at the thought of radical feminists talking about the psychosexual politics of terrorism.

Sources:

Week 1: Ghosts and Echoes. Robin Morgan, September 18, 2001.

Demon Lover. Robin Morgan, Ms. Magazine, January 23, 2002.

The sexuality of terrorism? Joelle Cowan, The Contrarian, December 12, 2001.

Identical Training Regimen for Military Men and Women Leads to More Injured Women

Great Britain’s army used to have a sexually segregated training regimen — men and women were held to different physical requirements for strength and other conditioning. The problem was that it turned out many of the women were leaving their basic training without the conditioning necessary to accomplish the tasks they were required to do.

In 1998, the army switched to a policy where the training and physical requirements are identical for both men and women. One of the results of that is apparently an increase in the number of injuries among women.

The BBC reported in early January about a study by Lt. Col. Ian Gemmell, an army occupational physician, about injury rates in the old and new regimens. Under the so-called ‘gender fair’ policy, where women trained by themselves and were not expected to meet the same physical fitness as men, the proportion of women discharged do to injuries such as stress fractures, tendonitis and pack pain was about 4.5 percent.

In the 2 years after the ‘gender free’ principle in which women trained alongside men and were required to meet the same physical fitness levels, the proportion of such medical discharges rose to 11 percent.

The main reason is that biological differences make women, on average, more susceptible to such training injuries. The lower muscle mass on average increases stress on the skeleton of women, women tend to emulate men’s generally longer stride in marching, etc. This sort of phenomenon is also seen in injury rates among women athletes, who are generally far more prone to these sort of injuries than are male athletes.

Source:

Army training ‘too tough for women’. The BBC, January 3, 2002.

Pentagon Revises Saudi Arabia Dress Code Ahead of Hearing on Lawsuit

Tampa, Florida-based Central Command, which has authority over U.S. military operations in the Middle East, recently ordered local commanders in the region to revise their policies to reflect that “wear[ing] of the abaya in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not mandatory but is strongly encouraged and to remove any requirement to wear civilian clothing to cover the uniform.”

Since the mid-1990s, the military had required women stationed in Saudi Arabia to wear the abaya — a head-to-toe black gown — when off-base in Saudi Arabia. Lt. Col. Martha McSally sued the defense department, claiming the requirement discriminated against women and violated the religious freedoms of women by forcing them to wear clothes associated with a specific religious faith.

In her lawsuit, McSally noted that the State Department does not require women working for it in Saudi Arabia to wear the abaya.

A hearing on McSally’s lawsuit was scheduled for February 4, and will likely proceed. Along with the dress code changes, lawyers for McSally also argue that restrictions that mandate that female soldiers be accompanied by men when off-base, prohibit women from driving, and force them to sit in the back seat of automobiles, also violated the rights of women stationed in Saudi Arabia. Those rules are apparently unaffected by the clothing policy change.

Source:

Saudi dress code for female troops revised. Ann Gerhart, Washington Post, January 23, 2002.

Ann Quindlen: Women Should Have to Register for the Draft, Just Like Men

Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a column the other day noting that although 1 in 5 new military recruits are women, men are still singled out and required to register with selective service for a potential future draft. Quindlen argues that this is a sexist anachronism. But, really, the entire selective service process is an anachronism.

To be sure, if there’s going to be mandatory draft registration, it should not discriminate against sex. Quindlen writes that when Jimmy Carter restored draft registration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both he and the Army chief of staff wanted registration to apply to both men and women.

Congress, however, rejected that idea and the Supreme Court held that since women were not allowed to serve in combat positions, it didn’t make sense to require them to register for the draft. But now women are actively engaged in combat in Afghanistan, so that argument doesn’t hold much water anymore.

But as much as I agree with Quindlen about the discriminatory nature of a male-only draft, the problem is really with the draft itself. For example, Quindlen chides feminists for not being more vocal about including women in the draft,

In 1980 NOW released a resolution that buried support for the registration of women beneath opposition to the draft, despite the fact that the draft had been redesigned to eliminate the vexing inequities of Vietnam, when the sons of the working class served and the sons of the Ivy League did not.

Huh? On this point I agree with the National Organization for Women — the draft is in principal wrong, and the Selective Service registration requirement should be eliminated. But, beyond that, as NOW put it in that 1980 resolution, people should “oppose any registration or draft that excludes women as an unconstitutional denial of rights to both young men and women.”

Opposition to the draft is not, as Quindlen implies, solely based on the class-based inequities of the Vietnam-era draft. In fact, at this point the selective service is largely symbolic with the Pentagon itself acknowledging in 1993 that eliminating it would have “no effect on military mobilization requirements, little effect on the time it would take to mobilize and no measurable effect on military recruitment.”

Draft registration is an anachronism whose time is long past. Lets kill the program outright, not waste time trying to reform it to be sex neutral.

Source:

Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha: It’s simple fairness: women as well as men should be required to register for the draft. Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.

A Dishonorable Discharge for Selective Service Doug Bandow, Cato Institute, September 20, 1999.

Are Men War Mongers?

Even when she temporarily strays away from animal rights ever so slightly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals chief ignoramus Ingrid Newkirk still manages to spread falsehoods and nonsense wherever she goes. This week, Bruce Friedrich posted an article by Newkirk, “Violence at home,” to an animal rights news list. Within the first three paragraphs, Newkirk manages to make three demonstrably false claims about violence and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States.

Newkirk opens her article by writing,

Is it a conicidence that, in the wake of the attacks on Washington and New York, most men speak of retaliation while most women express an urge to return to peace?

No, Ingrid, it is not a coincidence, its a complete falsehood. Zogby International interviewed 1,018 likely voters September 14-16, asking them, “Would you support or oppose an all-out war against countries which harbor or aid terrorists?”

Of those polled, 78.9 percent of men and 71.0 percent of women said they would support such an all-out war. When asked, “Do you agree or disagree that such a war would be worht it even if it involved substnatial American casualties?” 77.0 percent of men said they agree,d while 64.8 percent of women did as well.

The number of men and women who outright oppose such a war on terrorism are almost identical. Only 16.1 percent of men said they opposed an all-out war on terrorism, while 18.7 percent of women said they opposed such a war.

Apparently when Newkirk writes that “most women express an urge to return to peace,” she’s talking about her and her 5 closest friends, rather than the general female population of the United States.

Newkirk then goes on to describe a speech by Colman McCarthy. Newkirk writes,

At the Washington Center for Teach Peace, Professor Colman McCarthy has fretted over the fact that, year after year, his female studnets are always more open than his male students to the concept of peace. A Georgetown law student thought she had the answer. “Women want to know about nonviolence more than men because we are more victimized by violence than men. And, victims always want solutions quicker.”

This is pure nonsense. Aside from rapes that occur outside of prison, the overwhelming victims of violent acts are men. The risk of being the victim of an assault, murder or other act of violence is much higher for men than it is for women.

Finally, Newkirk repeats an oft-repeated but completely fake factoid.

The leading cause of injury to women is being beatne at home. Some women have more fear walking into their homes than walking out of them.

This claim is one of those factoids that appears commonly in domestic violence literature, almost always, as in Newkirk’s case, unattributed. This is because both Justice Department and Centers for Disease Control studies suggest that about 1 percent of women’s injuries are caused by their male partners.

Source:

Violence at home. Ingrid Newkirk, September 21, 2001.