Pope St. Pius X once warned that women in war would be the ruination of society. Nevertheless, spiritually dead Westerners have become indifferent to the prospect of the weaker sex being cast into battle. And Democrats have swept in and seized the moment, proposing an amendment to the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act that would require women to register for the armed services draft. Make no mistake, the only faithful response to such an outrage is contempt — then righteous defiance.
Women’s Changing Role in the U.S. Military
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Public Law 90-130,
opening certain promotions to women
For most of American history, when the nation still had a decent grip on reality, women were prohibited from serving in the armed forces in any capacity. They were only granted “regular” status in 1948 when President Truman signed into law the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act.
The decision to permit women to serve in the armed forces was, in its own right, a matter of considerable controversy. In fact, congressional lawmakers only greenlit such a barbarous policy in order to eliminate the need for a national male draft during the Cold War–era.
But even this liberalization came with substantial restrictions: Women weren’t allowed to command men, their training and duties were limited to non-combat tasks, and they were to comprise no more than 2% of those serving in the military.
A couple of decades later, in 1967, President Johnson, spurred on by a Vietnam War of his own making, opened various promotions for women and rubbished the 2% cap on women in active duty. This set the stage for the military’s authorization for women to command men, which came in 1972.
Then came President Jimmy Carter, who first floated the idea of including women in the draft in 1980 in order to chest-thump at Russian aggression in Afghanistan. But like many of Carter’s inane policy proposals, this garnered negligible support at the time, except in the most hardcore covens of equity feminists. Carter did, however, get the ball rolling for the epic blunder now receiving serious bipartisan consideration. Legitimized by presidential endorsement, the idea of drafting women became a fixture in American political consciousness, and it remained there, dormant, till the time was right for germination.
And germinate it did, thanks to Carter’s Democratic successors. In 1994, President Clinton opened all military positions to women except those involving direct ground combat. And in 2016, President Obama opened all military combat roles to women, removing the final real obstacle to their conscription. Obama’s secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, gleefully broke the news to the public, exulting: “They [women] will be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat. … They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men.”
The State of Affairs
Picking up right where the Obama administration left off, last year, Biden’s congressional Democrats proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would require women to register for the draft. It was ultimately defeated, but progressive lawmakers, manifesting the vicious resolve that has made possible the success of their ongoing social revolution, reintroduced the proposal this year. And round two of the legislative battle over Uncle Sam’s attempt to arrogate American wives and daughters is now underway.
Ironically, women now face the prospect of forced military service through the very draft that their voluntary enlistment was meant to avert.
While resistance to the proposed amendment has been underwhelming, especially in view of what’s truly at stake, it’s not been completely lacking.
Last month, a group of nine Republican senators whipped up enough pluck to play some active defense. Led by Sen. Josh Hawley, the group, which also features conservative heavy-hitters Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, introduced the “Don’t Draft our Daughters” resolution, which aimed to “strike language extending the draft to women” from the NDAA. Hawley issued a corresponding press release, making clear his cause. “Forcing our daughters, mothers, wives and sisters to fight our wars is wrong,” Hawley inveighed. But despite this limited opposition, the NDAA amendment’s fate hangs in the balance, and with it the future of millions of American women.
Human Nature vs. Army Barbie
This latest gambit by the Party of Death is nothing short of a crime against natural and divine law — and American women and their families are the victims. What, after all, is more reflexively off-putting than the thought of a wife and mother kissing her husband and sobbing children goodbye as she prepares to deploy — scandalously, with a predominantly male unit — for battle? Only a society poisoned by the treachery of feminism could shrug at a travesty such as this.
The natural order condemns, in no uncertain terms, the farce of the fighting woman. For instance, it’s well-known in the anthropological sciences that while women exceed men in social skills, verbal skills and empathy; men outstrip women in independence, dominance and aggression. The ability to share feelings and socialize, however, doesn’t get you through brutal field-training workouts, much less the crucible of combat. Dominance and aggression do.
A WNBA player drives the ball
It should also come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever accidentally flipped the channel to a WNBA game that nearly half of female soldiers failed the new Army fitness test — a test most male soldiers breeze through, mind you. In fact, the male–female fitness contrast is so stark that the decidedly non-conservative outfit Military.com was forced to run a headline reluctantly acknowledging the obvious: “Nearly Half of Female Soldiers Still Failing New Army Fitness Test, While Males Pass Easily.” But do you suppose the military realized the error of its ways and did an about-face on enlisting soldieresses? Of course not: To everyone’s utter lack of surprise, the Army lowered physical fitness standards to accommodate the damsels in distress — oops, I mean the “powerful hero women.”
Female incompatibility with military service was also underscored by a landmark 2015 Marine Corps study. The research confirmed what’s been intuitive to literally every society from the dawn of mankind till the mid-20th century — women aren’t fit for combat. It found that all-male ground combat units are stronger, faster and more lethal than squads that include women. The all-male units outperformed the “gender-integrated” units (i.e., those with interloping “Marinettes“) in 69% of tasks. This blurb from the Marine Corps report speaks volumes: “When negotiating the wall obstacle, male Marines threw their packs to the top of the wall, whereas female Marines required regular assistance in getting their packs to the top.” I believe “case in point” is the appropriate expression.
The study also showed that women have a significantly higher rate of injury than men, which hamstrings the military’s combat readiness, to say the least. Indeed, 40.5% of female soldiers suffered muscle, tendon and ligament injuries; compared with a mere 18.8% of the men. So much for the myth of G.I. Jane and all the other Mary Sues of pop-culture origin.
The Church Against Military Women
But it isn’t just the intelligible universe and fundamental anthropology that scream out in protest against women playing soldier — it’s also the law of God, as articulated by the Church Fathers and the Magisterium.
For instance, unpacking the book of Titus, fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople St. John Chrysostom condemned as “subverters of all decency” men who “lead out women to war, as if they were men” and “suffer [them] to bear arms.” Saint Clement of Alexandria concurred, writing in his Stromata (the third book of his trilogy regarding the Christian life), “We do not train our women like Amazons to manliness in war. … She is destined for child-bearing and housekeeping.”
Pope John Paul II visits children in
Des Moines, Iowa (1979)
Speaking 1,500 years later, Pope Pius X lent his voice to the chorus: “Women in war or parliament are outside their proper sphere, and their position there would be the desperation and ruin of society. … How mistaken, therefore, is that misguided feminism which seeks to correct God’s work. It is like a mechanic trying to correct the signs and movements of the universe.”
Pope Leo XIII taught in his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum,
Work which is quite suitable for a strong man cannot rightly be required from a woman or a child. Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family.
And John Paul II explained why Holy Mother Church takes the stance She does. “Motherhood is woman’s vocation. It is an eternal vocation, and it is also a contemporary vocation,” the pontiff urged, adding, “everything must be done in order that the dignity of this splendid vocation may not be broken in the inner life of the new generations; in order that the authority of the woman-mother may not be diminished in the family, social and public life, and in the whole of our civilization.”
One is hard-pressed to think of activities more opposed to the essence of motherhood — which is to give and nurture life — than training for and partaking in mortal combat. Woman should be shielded from any activity that offends or wounds her primordial vocation, and this means, perhaps most especially, war and all its corollaries.
Civil Disobedience
So if women’s presence in the military profession is itself a despicable perversion of the natural order, how much more of an infamy is it for the State to rip women from the bosom of the home and, at the point of a bayonet, install them in the barracks? Certainly, an institutional mandate so destructive of the authentic calling and rightful preoccupations of the female sex is to be viewed as a moral evil. And the depravity of such a policy is only magnified by the fact that it seems to be baldly predicated on a slavish adherence to the false idol of sexual egalitarianism and a rejection of the divergent callings of men and women.
Army women performing light exercise
(Photo: Sarah D. Sangster/U.S. Army)
Indeed, one of the original NDAA amendment’s sponsors, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, admits her motivation for pushing the issue: changing the current “outdated way of thinking about things.” According to Houlahan, “Equity is important, and women have constantly had to fight for a level playing field — and this change is a step in the right direction.”
So, by way of response, it’s worth taking the time to reiterate my earlier point: It is an abominable abuse for American women to be sacrificed at the altar of feminism so that a bunch of tomboys who can barely run, climb or heft a gun can be affirmed in their foolish life aspirations. Perhaps Pius XII has the best rejoinder: “In concessions made to woman, one can easily see not respect for her dignity or her mission, but an attempt to foster the economic and military power of the totalitarian state, to which all must inexorably be subordinated.”
“An unjust law is no law at all,” as St. Augustine of Hippo famously said. And his position is echoed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which, citing Thomas Aquinas, clarifies:
Authority does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself. … A human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence [§1902].
The Catechism goes on to specify:
The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community [§2242].
“A Catholic may be a conscientious objector,” agrees Servant of God Fr. John Hardon, “when a given war is undoubtedly unjust, or when a person believes that for him, under the circumstances, participation would be morally wrong.”
‘Sin Came Into the World Through One Man’
The Catechism makes clear that our disobedience of unjust laws isn’t a mere option; it’s a moral obligation. And, as we’ve established, allowing women to be professional soldiers — or worse, forcing them to be professional soldiers — is emphatically unjust on both the natural and divine levels. Therefore, Americans have a duty to rise up against these damnable policies, to shield their wives and daughters from conscription into a life for which they were not fashioned. There’s simply no other choice.
Just as Adam sinned by failing to protect Eve from the temptations of the Serpent, slothful men who sit idle while the women they love are kidnapped and thrown into battle sin gravely. So be obedient in the eyes of God and dare to disobey the subversive diktats of Big Brother.
