The scandal about Affirmative Action quotas is not only that they are unjust, but that those engaged in this practice have been lying about it and covering it up. The practice of “race norming” under which the government secretly adds points to the pre-employment test scores of minorities and then reports falsely inflated scores to prospective employer, has been going on for ten years, but news of this chicanery only reached Dan Rather’s CBS TV news last week.
The Georgetown University student who recently exposed the truth about minority quotas for admission to law school narrowly escaped expulsion — not because what he wrote isn’t true, but because the authorities didn’t want anybody to know about the deception.
A pervasive coverup about Affirmative Action is the crux of the battle about the so-called civil Rights bill now pending in Congress. President Bush is standing firm against hiring quotas, but the joke is that he chose as his platform one of the worst offenders — the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
We can thank the recent Virginia Military Institute (VMI) trial for providing proof about how Affirmative Action preferentially benefits female cadets at West Point. Those who are suing VMI to force it to admit women and to feminize its curriculum called as their witness colonel Patrick Toffler, a west Point spokesman, who was supposed to testify that sexual integration is a success at the U.S. Military Academy.
During five hours of cross-examination under oath, Colonel Toffler revealed a lot of things that West Point has heretofore concealed. He admitted that West Point does not require the same physical performance of female cadets that it requires of male cadets.
He admitted that West Point, has dual standards for males and females; that women cadets do not pass the same physical tests as the men, and that, if they perform the same task, the women are given higher grades. Female cadets are allowed to hold leadership positions based on their padded scores.
Colonel Toffler admitted how the training has been changed – “modified” he called it — to accommodate what the female cadets are physically capable of doing and so that they won’t be “psychologically discouraged.” For example, events “which require considerable upper-body strength” have been eliminated from the obstacle course, cadets now run in jogging shoes instead of in boots, a lighter weight rifle has been substituted, judo is allowed to substitute for boxing, and the forced march carrying a heavy pack has been eliminated.
Colonel Toffler admitted that West Point has a sexual quota system for the admission of women cadets and for their assignment after graduation (such as to the engineers). “Those quotas have got to be met,” he said. The women cadets do not compete with the men; they compete against each other for designated female quota slots.
Colonel Toffler admitted that, to accommodate the women who cannot perform as well as the men, West Point has changed from equal training of all cadets to “comparable or equivalent training.” This is a concept that, if men and women exert equivalent effort, they will be ranked as though they had achieved equal performance. For example, since women lack the arm strength to do pullups, they are required only to exert “comparable effort” to do a “flexed arm hang.”
Colonel Toffler admitted that no free speech is permitted about the performance of women at West Point. Female cadets are allowed to correct their superiors who use such words as “chairman” instead of “chairperson,” but, as the New York Times reported on May 26, it is a “career-killer” for a man to utter anything negative about the performance of women.
Since we now know that female cadets do not and cannot compete equally with men at West Point, we can say positively that, if Congress acquiesces in the current feminist demand to repeal the laws that exclude women from military combat, this will mean Affirmative Action quotas for women in occupations in which they cannot compete equally with men.
Pretending that women can perform equally with men in military combat tasks is not only dishonest; it corrupts the system. Furthermore, it’s ridiculous even to discuss repealing the combat- exclusion laws until the military comes to grip with the pregnancy and motherhood questions.
Pregnancy and motherhood are simply not compatible with military service. Repealing the combat-exclusion laws would mean giving women expensive aircraft training in peacetime along with the choice to opt out by pregnancy in wartime. Of course, the men would get no such option.
