The Patriot Post® · Republicans: Don't Draft Our Girls
“Anybody who wants to come conscript my daughter can f*** off.”
So said Texas Congressman Chip Roy, who has apparently taken, er, umbrage with the 2023 version of the National Defense Authorization Act. That’s the annual bill that sets policy for the Department of Defense and that the Senate Armed Services Committee, with a strongly bipartisan 23-3 vote, has sent to the full Senate for passage.
As the Washington Examiner’s Jamie McIntyre reports: “The bill calls for $857.6 billion in defense spending, a $45 billion plus-up, over the budget requested by the Biden administration, largely to cover the effects of inflation, to address the need to replace munitions sent to Ukraine, and provide additional resources for the unfunded priorities of U.S. combatant commanders.”
All of that rationale is probably well and good with most Republicans, but we’d like to see a bunch more Chip Roys stand up and sound off on behalf of our daughters. At issue is the provision within the bill that would amend the Military Selective Service Act to require women to register for the draft. As McIntyre continues, “Republicans succeeded in striking the proposal in last year’s NDAA, but it made it through the committee [this time] over the objections of three members, Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Roger Wicker, R-Miss.”
As the father of two draft-age daughters, I’m picking up what Roy is laying down. So, it seems, is a larger group of Senate Republicans, who have since sent a letter to Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed, 72, a Rhode Island Democrat and a West Point graduate. The letter reads, in part:
Reviving these efforts would be a grave mistake and would needlessly inject divisive social policies into important debates over our national security.
Women have served in and alongside the Armed Forces since our nation’s founding. Time and again, they have answered the call of duty and served honorably — often heroically — when our nation needed them. But they have done so of their own will. While American men are required to register for the military draft and fight if needed, these requirements have never been applied to American women. Where they have fought, they have done so freely.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who signed the letter, was a bit more genteel than Roy, and a bit more forceful than the letter he signed: “My daughters know that they’re capable of achieving anything they set their minds to. But the idea that our government would force women into service through the draft to fight our nation’s wars is immoral and outrageous.”
Women can be as tough as nails, but they aren’t men — not physically, not emotionally. Whether biological or sociological, their very presence in a combat environment is disruptive and therefore deadly. As such, it’s beyond us why a single Republican would support this provision — a provision that no doubt has the support of Joe Biden and his delusional colleagues. Why hand the radical Left and its “toxic masculinity” minions a victory? Why give aid and comfort to their efforts to deconstruct the sexes and desecrate the God-ordained differences between women and men? And by a 23-3 margin? What gives with these people?
Momentarily setting aside the moral issue, this is also bad politics. As this Ipsos poll indicates, support for drafting women into the military has actually decreased since 2016, when 63% of Americans supported it. By August 2021, that number had dropped a whopping 18 points, to 45% in favor. Even more remarkably, a majority of men, 55%, thought women should be forced to register, whereas only 36% of women agreed.
So: By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, American women don’t want to be drafted.
American men, it seems, should support their women — if not for reasons of military readiness then for societal and civilizational reasons. Women bear our children. Putting them on the battlefield works immediately and powerfully against this.
It seems to us that the arguments made in favor of preserving women’s sports can also be made to keep them from being drafted. The physical differences between the sexes are both glaring and well documented. The numerous male attributes include greater height and weight, broader shoulders, greater circulating blood volume, greater resistance to dehydration, larger lung capacity, thicker skin, faster sensory frame shifting, more hemoglobin in the blood, greater upper-body strength, faster reaction times, greater bone density in the arms, larger sweat capacity, higher systolic blood pressure, higher muscle-to-fat ratio, and larger hearts.
Michigan Republican Lisa McClain, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, disparaged the draft push, saying she “cannot see any strategic benefits our military would gain by doing so.”
As for her colleagues over in the House, Roy and others are gearing up for the fight. “If the entire Republican establishment ends up getting behind drafting my daughter,” he said, “then I will dedicate my efforts to burning that establishment to the ground. You’re not going to draft my daughter, and I don’t care who I piss off in preventing that.”
Good on him.