Democrats’ strange obsession with drafting your daughters
The Senate adjourned Thursday and won’t be back in the office for another two weeks, leaving the issue of drafting women unresolved over the July 4 break.
That’s a pretty big deal, at least in broader America. In D.C., it’s just business as usual and is explained matter-of-factly. The House of Representatives passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act on Friday, June 14, with no requirement to enroll women in the Selective Service System (the system used in a draft). Then, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed its version of the bill but slipped the infrastructure for drafting women into the mix. Now, the bills go “to conference,” where the committees and staff from the House and Senate will work out their differences.
‘This is an issue where voters — regardless of what part of the country they come from or what party they belong to — are not OK with this.’
The move “has raised some hackles among members of the far-right,” a particularly inept New York Post reporter claimed Thursday, but it appears the Democrats’ strange compulsion to draft women is creating discomfort more broadly than that.
And it is a Democratic project. While the committee process is classified, Blaze News has learned multiple Senate Democrats have introduced the idea in committee before along partisan lines without GOP support.
Their Democratic colleagues outside the committee who are up for re-election sang a less enthusiastic tune when reporters caught up with them. Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Bob Casey (Penn.) claimed to be unfamiliar with the proposal. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who is in a particularly close race against Republican Tim Sheehy, told the Washington Examiner he would “have to take a look at it.”
“It’s basic human instinct,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told Blaze News. “You don’t send women to fight so long as able-bodied men exist to fight. It’s a fundamental notion. You don’t even have to get to a moral question on this; it’s a survival question. This isn’t what human beings want to do when you want to survive.”
And while no Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Commitee were reportedly “in favor,” it passed out of committee 22-3, with one of the nays from the Democratic chairman, who said he opposed breaking budget-cap limits. The markup is classified, but members can say how they voted and will when they want to score political points.
“You’ve got a number of Republicans who are opposed to this,” Lee told Blaze News, “but some of those Republicans who have expressed opposition to it also voted to advance it out of committee, so the question is how much fight will you see out of them between now and when it hits the floor?”
And not all Republicans are even opposed to the idea. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) said drafting women is about “opportunity.”
“This is not about combat,” she told reporters. “It is about their opportunity to serve.”
Defenders of the system say it isn’t technically a draft, and that’s true — the United States hasn’t had a draft since the Vietnam War, and reinstating it would require an additional act of Congress. But it’s only true until the United States decides it’s time to draft people again. Then the promises of not drafting women become a promise not to draft women into combat roles, which becomes simply drafting women into combat roles. It’s creating the infrastructure for doing exactly what politicians claim they won’t do. Unlikely, to say the least.
When “it’s the law,” Lee said, “we create the expectation that women will be drafted. It will lead to a draft of women next time we have a draft.”
After July 4, Republicans are going to have to figure out how hard they’re willing to fight a whole lot of modern feminist tropes too many politicians accept unthinkingly. On the other side, Democrats are going to have to decide just how important it is to them to draft women and whether it’s worth putting vulnerable colleagues like Brown and Tester in the hot seat.
And even once vacation is over, the summer timeline isn’t long. While committee staffers will be hard at work throughout, the actual House and Senate committees are only scheduled to be in session a combined 11 days before breaking for the long August recess.
That leaves time for those against drafting women to get their message out there. “Once public attention gets put on it, things change,” Lee told Blaze News, “because people realize the juice isn’t worth the squeeze when people are upset. … This is an issue where voters — regardless of what part of the country they come from or what party they belong to — are not OK with this.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who led the resistance three years ago when Congress last proposed drafting women, was a little blunter. “If Republicans even think about drafting women,” he told Blaze News, “every ounce of my being will be directed at destroying what’s left of the party.”
Washington Examiner: Senate Democrats dodge whether to expand draft to women
Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter
Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford’s newsletter.
The fire rises: The Weekly Dish: My problem with IVF — and ours
Blogger Andrew Sullivan was arguably the
most influential journalist in America’s long slide toward gay marriage. That makes it all the more interesting when he comes out against IVF:
And that’s the rub for me. In many cases, you’re creating new lives only to destroy them as waste. In many others, you don’t destroy them; you merely use them to beat the odds. They are quite simply a means to an end, violating a basic norm of inviolable human dignity. And these “means” are your own offspring. IVF literally requires a mother to play Sophie’s Choice several times over.
And it’s harder to put these discarded humans out of your mind the way you can recover from an abortion, once the fetus has been dispensed with. Because they are still alive! By freezing them, you are conceding that they can one day change from a human being to a human person, with all the profound ramifications of that. And you may already have in front of you a growing IVF-created child who now has several siblings alive, just frozen in perpetual darkness.
That’s what brings it home to me. There are now more than 600,000 future human beings sitting in “cryogenic nurseries” waiting for the light to come on — millions of brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, consigned indefinitely to living in vitro. Yes, the embryo has no memory, no sentience when frozen, no mind or will yet. There is no suffering. But the lack of suffering does not mean there is no sadness. Or no humanity.
