The National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service issued a report in March recommending that Congress “eliminate male-only registration and expand draft eligibility to all individuals of the appropriate age cohort,” because “expanding draft eligibility to women will enable the military to access the most qualified individuals, regardless of sex.” Women have been eligible to occupy all combat roles since 2015.
This is from Ella Lubell, “Senate Considers Requiring Women to Register for the Draft,” Reason Hit and Run, July 22, 2021.
Lubell also points out the ACLU’s disappointing stance:
“Like many laws that appear to benefit women, men-only registration actually impedes women’s full participation in civic life,” says the ACLU on its website. “Limiting registration to men sends a message that women are unqualified to serve in the military, regardless of individual capabilities and preferences. It reflects an outmoded view that, in the event of a draft, women’s primary duty would be to the home front—and, on the flip side, that men are unqualified to be caregivers.”
This is appalling, especially coming from the ACLU, one of whose founding members, Roger Baldwin, went to prison for refusing to be drafted during World War I. Notice that the ACLU doesn’t mention rights but, instead, wants equal oppression. What would send a message to women that they are unqualified to serve would be a policy by the U.S. military that they can’t serve. But they can. The actual message that the U.S. government is sending to women by not forcing them to register for a draft is that the government respects women’s rights. The government should also start respecting men’s rights.
Here’s what Chad Seagren and I wrote on this issue a few years ago. One excerpt:
Note the irony: feminists and their allies, in arguing for greater inclusion of a sometimes marginalized element of the population, actually seek to extend an institution that ruthlessly exploits the most marginalized segment of the population.
Women’s advocates who favor opening selective service for women are correct that doing so will result in more “equality” between the sexes. However, this is equality of oppression. It is as if, rather than argue for the total elimination of slavery in the name of freedom and equality, nineteenth-century abolitionists advocated extending slavery to whites. There is an alternative that serves both equality and freedom: end the selective service system altogether.
I do have one major disagreement with Ella Lubell. Here’s her last paragraph:
If Democrats are considering making changes to the draft, they should not exchange women’s liberty for gender equality. Rather, they should extend to men the privilege that women already enjoy.
My disagreement is with one word she uses in the second sentence of that paragraph. Can you guess the word?
Postscript:
I have long been a fan of Roger Baldwin, and still am. It was partly because of my admiration for him and for the ACLU’s actions defending free speech in the 1970s, that I joined the ACLU only a few weeks after getting my green card. (I had worried, probably unnecessarily that listing my membership in the ACLU would hurt my chances to immigrate.) But in researching this post, I learned something about Baldwin that I found disappointing. This is from the NYT obituary:
Under the threat of Hitlerism, he modified his views of the draft in World War II, and was among those A.C.L.U. members who opposed organizational support in the courts for draft resistance in the Vietnam conflict.
READER COMMENTS
Frank
Jul 22 2021 at 7:01pm
When women were first allowed into near combat jobs in the military, the men complained that the women were taking all the cushy jobs. If women are drafted, there will be no cushy jobs left for men. Hence, in the interest of equality, I have long advocated that only women are drafted for combat jobs. 🙂
[Of course, the wrong word is “privilege”.]
David Seltzer
Jul 23 2021 at 5:22pm
I agree Frank. Liberty is not a “privilege.” It is an unalienable right.
Matthias
Jul 24 2021 at 1:42am
Huh? Liberty is totally alienable.
Eg I’m normally at liberty to go where I want (in public), or to associate with who I want.
But it’s totally fine for me to enter a contract that requires me to be at a certain place for a while (eg the office), and associate with some people (coworkers and clients), and forbids me from associating with other people (competitors).
And a reasonable court system enforces this alienation (or the specified contract penalties).
David Seltzer
Jul 24 2021 at 9:45am
If liberty were totally alienable, then it’s not liberty. It’s subject to arbitrary restriction. If you entered those contracts voluntarily, you did so because you were free to accept the terms of that agreement including the restrictions you mention. Unalienable, as I understand the adjective, means inherent in every person and NOT granted by law.
KevinDC
Jul 22 2021 at 11:19pm
Frank is correct – “privilege” is the wrong word to describe the situation! If I refrain from violating your rights, I’m not extending a “privilege” to you – I’m merely giving you your due.
The ACLU’s perplexing stance in this case seems like a prime example of what happens when you treat “equality” as though it had intrinsic (as opposed to merely instrumental) value. Suppose some kind of law was passed that imposed an unjust burden on left handed people. To me, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the appropriate solution is to stop imposing the unjust infringement on the left handed people. But the sort of logic the ACLU is using here suggests that if we also unjustly oppressed all right handed and ambidextrous people in the same way, we’d be making things better! Because equality! This seems very odd to me. Injustice is bad – call me a courageous contrarian if you must for saying so, but that’s what I think. And I think we ought to oppose injustice by attempting to minimize, rather than maximize, its scope.
David Henderson
Jul 24 2021 at 10:19am
Well stated, KevinDC, as always.
MarkW
Jul 23 2021 at 7:00am
My fear and suspicion here is that this would be used to prepare the ground to draft young people for some sort of ‘year of national service’. As long as registration is male-only, that would be impossible, but if it was generalized (to make it ‘fair’) — watch out.
David Henderson
Jul 23 2021 at 11:14am
Good point. BTW, I started writing about this about 30 years ago when John McCain was pushing “voluntary” service but I got one of his staffers to admit on the phone that that was a step toward compulsion.
Retired General Stanley McChrystal has been pushing national service, but one gets the sense that he would get compulsion if he could. I asked him about it at the Naval Postgraduate School a few years ago and got a flippant answer back.
Peter
Jul 23 2021 at 2:27pm
Let’s take a step back here from a second and let’s just talk about reality but first off let’s just start with the draft should be abolished period from a libertarian perspective and as was stated, it’s not the libertarian position that equal oppression is the answer to anything.
That said let’s quit pretending here the standing draft serves any useful need or, outside extreme circumstances, would you want to draft women anyways. Having a standing draft is pointless as we (the US) have not fought a defensive war bent on occupation or even significant concessions ever. Why that matters is even historically where manpower mattered more simply as meat shields given the technology, we had time to institute a draft and we would in the future as well. If we need soldiers in an offense operation because our million person military can’t deal with it and meat shields actually matter (i.e. a draft is irrelevant in a nuclear war), we will get a new draft up and running efficiently as we have for all of history. Conscription and drafting is an old hat to governments worldwide going back to the dawn of man. I’m sure the first tribal chief in the planet figured out how to use a press gang the first conflict he ever had where he was losing.
Which moves on to why not women. Will first and foremost, when it comes to meat shields in an offensive war, they simply perform worse plus it’s both demotivating for the male soldiers who like to think we need to go fight them “over there” so the the woman they like back home who is busy working on a population replacement for them the day after they leave is safe and ” and dangerous as men engage in courting instead of shooting as anybody who has been to a modern warzone can attest to. And that first part about female promiscuity is important because you need lots of child bearing healthy women (i.e. the sort that would get drafted) to repopulate your nation for the next war and you just don’t need a lot of men; hell the men can even be the from the opposite side hence your sides men really don’t matter. Like it or not, from a existential point of view, the only time a draft should ever be implemented, women’s duty to the country is to breed and they can’t do that catching bullets.
Now if we are talking defensive wars, there is a limited case for women there and you generally see it naturally regardless to but generally it’s at the point when you get to the the standard “draft elderly, invalids, children all of whom are male” and that should simply get extended to “barren women” as well.
The draft isn’t about equal opportunity here nor should it be. It’s oppressive slavery and a violation of every right we can agree on. It simply needs to get done away with with the realization in the future it can just be reinstituted on a whim and when/if so, still exempt babymakers because that is what they need to do.a
Frank
Jul 23 2021 at 3:04pm
Having women in combat jobs tends to be highly dysfunctional. From Wikipedia:
Lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman‘s book On Killing briefly mentions that female soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been officially prohibited from serving in close combat military operations since 1948. The reason for removing female soldiers from the front lines was due less to the performance of female soldiers, and more due to the behavior of the male infantrymen after witnessing a woman wounded. The IDF saw a complete loss of control over soldiers who apparently experienced an instinctual protective aggression that was uncontrollable, severely degrading the unit’s combat effectiveness.
Mark Brady
Jul 24 2021 at 12:17am
David, your remarks about Roger Baldwin got me digging and I quickly found this fascinating article about Baldwin and General Douglas MacArthur, which perhaps throws some light on why his views on the draft changed over the years.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/mr-aclu-and-general
Michael Sandifer
Jul 24 2021 at 9:18am
David,
You actually oppose the authority of the government to draft soldiers? I understand opposing a standing draft, absent a war, as long as national security allows it, but would you have opposed the World War 2 draft?
One could oppose the war in Vietnam without opposing the draft.
David Henderson
Jul 24 2021 at 10:24am
You asked:
Yes.
You asked:
Yes. Indeed, Canada, where I grew up, eh? was in WWII over 2 years before the U.S. entered, and fought the war without a draft until about the last year of the war.
You wrote:
I agree. Indeed, without the intellectual leadership of people like Martin Anderson, Milton Friedman, and Walter Oi, and without Nixon’s commitment to ending the draft, the Vietnam war would have likely have ended with the draft still in place.
Michael Sandifer
Jul 24 2021 at 8:18pm
That’s interesting. Does that mean you’re confident that there will always be enough volunteers to fight a war that needs to be fought, or do you think giving people a choice is more important than national security?
Peter
Aug 12 2021 at 5:57am
I’m not David Michael but I’m curious on a single case where you think US national security was ever at risk (ever) and in that case, believe a draft saved us from ruin.
Schepp
Jul 28 2021 at 1:11pm
If a XY individual believes she is a woman, a belief that is incentivize by avoid war, is she required to register with Today’s law?
Given there are no gender roles required, once draft is avoided no lifestyle change is needed?
Comments are closed.