It’s the newspaper pictures that did it — the photographs of soldier mothers tearfully saying goodbye to their babies as they depart to serve in the Gulf War. The U.S. Armed Services have even shipped out breastfeeding mothers of infants only two, three, six, or eight weeks old.
How uncivilized has our nation become! No national emergency requires this inhumane sacrifice. No cause in the Middle East justifies this shame to our nation.
In a speech at the Pentagon last fall, President Bush said that he sent our forces to the Middle East in order to defend “our way of life.” Sending moms to battle isn’t the “way of life” for any Americans except the radical feminists who are over military and child-bearing age or haven’t any daughters.
Secretary Dick Cheney has so far refused to address the issue of sending moms to war. He has been so conditioned by the militant feminists in the Pentagon that he doesn’t dare to use gender-specific language.
Cheney’s official response is that it would “hinder the military’s effectiveness” to upset the rule that “single parents and military couples are fully deployable and available for assignment anywhere in the world.” That isn’t the issue; trying to talk in gender-neutral language about tearing mothers away from their newborns and little babies and sending them off to war is equivocation.
Anyway, who created the asinine rule that mothers of newborns are “fully deployable”? It surely wasn’t Congress or the American people. The Pentagon created its own rule, and it is up to the Pentagon to dig itself out of this hole.
U.S. law specifically excludes not just mothers but all women from military combat duty. When Jimny Carter’s Administration tried hard to repeal these laws in 1979, congress held hearings and then said “forget it.”
But the feminists didn’t give up, since combat duty has always been the cutting edge of their goal to transform America into a fully gender-neutral society. Militant feminists in the Pentagon, and in the tax-funded special-interest lobby called DACOWITS (Defense Advisory Committee On Women In The Services), nagged the military until so many “combat-related,” “combat-support,” and “combat zone” positions were filled by women that the distinction became blurred.
So the great and powerful U.S. military has been pretending there is no difference between men and women, even if they are mothers, and that giving birth to a baby is only a temporary disability like breaking a leg. To carry on this pretense, official U.S. military policy has been ignoring common sense, family integrity, and the American culture.
The deception appeared to work in the peacetime military when women were pursuing their “career opportunities” for “social nobility upwards,” as the feminists like to say. But then, along came a war with real bullets and, as summarized in a recent headline, “For women near the front lines, there’s no such thing as non-combat duty.”
But the U.S. military forgot about the babies who are the chief victims of this silly pretense.
It’s embarrassing to see these big tough officers, with their chests full of medals, complaining, “Those women signed up voluntarily and filed forms stating that, in case they were deployed, they had arranged for a ‘care provider’ for the child left behind.” It’s now obvious that this procedure was a sham.
Twenty-year-old girls didn’t comprehend how their world would change if (a) a baby came into their lives and (b) we had a shooting war at the same time. But older officers should have known, yet they allowed those young women to live in the dream world of believing that military service has nothing to do with war.
One new mother ordered by our military to ship out for the Gulf said she felt she had to go because she made a commitment and, “there are times when we’re mothers and times when we’re soldiers.” As if they are equally important!
The truth is that there is only one job in the world she can do better than anyone else, and that is be a mother to her own baby. There are a million men in America who can do her job in the Gulf, and the U.S. military should have known that before the situation developed.
Army Pfc. Sherry Kaiser, age 20, said, “If they want to court-martial me, they’ll have to, but on what grounds? That I want to take care of my baby?”
The men in the Pentagon and the Armed Services have brought this embarrassment on our nation because they allowed themselves to be hen-pecked by the militant feminists. It’s time for Secretary Cheney and the U.S. military to stand up and be men and say out loud that they will stop sending mothers to a war half way around the world. The “American way of life” includes mothers caring for their own babies.
