QUESTION OF THE WEEK: Society

(Each "Question of the Week," an idea which I gleaned from A Republic If You Can Keep It, will remain toward the top of the blog until the next question appears. The previous Questions of the Week are HERE. Please scroll down for recent postings)

The commentary "Mother of All Blunders," published in the Washington Post around the time that the British sailors and marines were being held hostage by Iran, received quite a bit of input in "Letters to the Editor." Not quite a firestorm, but close.

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Excerpt from the article:

It is not fashionable these days to suggest that women don't belong in or near combat -- or that children need their mothers. Yes, they need their fathers, too, but children in their tender years are dependent on their mothers in unique ways.

[...]

Why the West has seen it necessary to diminish motherhood so that women can pretend to be men remains a mystery to sane adults. It should be unnecessary to say that the military is not a proper vehicle for social experimentation but is a machine dedicated to fighting and, if necessary, killing.

[...]

What kind of man, one shudders to wonder, is willing to allow his country's women to be raped and tortured by men of enemy nations? None that I know, but our military is gradually weaning men of their intuitive inclination to protect women -- which, by extrapolation, means ignoring the screams of women being assaulted.

At the point when our men can stand by unfazed while American servicewomen are raped and tortured, then we will have no cause to fight any war. We will have already lost.

Positioning women to become pawns of propaganda, meanwhile, is called aiding and abetting the enemy.

Read the entire essay. Read the reaction here and here.


QUESTION OF THE WEEK, in two parts: (1) What is your view of women in the military? (2) Has the West, over the past several decades, been diminishing the role of motherhood?