Ann Quindlen: Women Should Have to Register for the Draft, Just Like Men
Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a column the other day noting that although 1 in 5 new military recruits are women, men are still singled out and required to register with selective service for a potential future draft. Quindlen argues that this is a sexist anachronism. But, really, the entire selective service process is an anachronism.
To be sure, if there’s going to be mandatory draft registration, it should not discriminate against sex. Quindlen writes that when Jimmy Carter restored draft registration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both he and the Army chief of staff wanted registration to apply to both men and women.
Congress, however, rejected that idea and the Supreme Court held that since women were not allowed to serve in combat positions, it didn’t make sense to require them to register for the draft. But now women are actively engaged in combat in Afghanistan, so that argument doesn’t hold much water anymore.
But as much as I agree with Quindlen about the discriminatory nature of a male-only draft, the problem is really with the draft itself. For example, Quindlen chides feminists for not being more vocal about including women in the draft,
In 1980 NOW released a resolution that buried support for the registration of women beneath opposition to the draft, despite the fact that the draft had been redesigned to eliminate the vexing inequities of Vietnam, when the sons of the working class served and the sons of the Ivy League did not.
Huh? On this point I agree with the National Organization for Women — the draft is in principal wrong, and the Selective Service registration requirement should be eliminated. But, beyond that, as NOW put it in that 1980 resolution, people should “oppose any registration or draft that excludes women as an unconstitutional denial of rights to both young men and women.”
Opposition to the draft is not, as Quindlen implies, solely based on the class-based inequities of the Vietnam-era draft. In fact, at this point the selective service is largely symbolic with the Pentagon itself acknowledging in 1993 that eliminating it would have “no effect on military mobilization requirements, little effect on the time it would take to mobilize and no measurable effect on military recruitment.”
Draft registration is an anachronism whose time is long past. Lets kill the program outright, not waste time trying to reform it to be sex neutral.
Source:
Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha: It’s simple fairness: women as well as men should be required to register for the draft. Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.
A Dishonorable Discharge for Selective Service Doug Bandow, Cato Institute, September 20, 1999.
The Ann Quindlen: Women Should Have to Register for the Draft, Just Like Men by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tags: National Organization for Women
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