If Women Vote, They Should Also Be Eligible for the Draft

This year’s reauthorization of U.S. military spending includes a provision registering women for the draft when they turn 18, same as men. Under the provisions, both sexes also will be automatically registered with Selective Service when they turn 18, rather than having to personally fill out the paperwork or face prison time.

Even in our highly feminist culture, women do not support being drafted. Yet of course many support female-preferential policies if it gets them privileges and sinecures instead of responsibilities, such as in sports (Title IX) and workplaces (Title VII).

I also don’t support drafting women, because I have moral and natural rights objections to women serving in combat positions in the military. Men and women are different, and part of that difference is that female bodies poorly sustain combat-level stress. Even ripped women are physically inferior to average men, and female soldiers are much more likely to get and stay injured, damaging the readiness and lethality of their units. This means more U.S. soldiers dead and injured because of sexual politics.

On top of all this is the fact that putting women in the military also increases pregnancy and STD rates, which also damages unit readiness because pregnant women are lost to their command for a significant time. Units train together and need every member to function at peak, so losing one person affects all the rest. Not to mention that it’s terrible for the baby — and the mother! — for mom to have to return to full-time military duty just weeks after giving birth.

Women and combat should only combine in foreign invasion scenarios, not as the routine order of military operation. Women do not make good soldiers, and a humane country would never force women into combat duty.

But the people leading our society don’t care about any of this. Women have been approved for combat positions in the U.S. military since the Obama administration.

My daughters will be conscientious objectors if they are ever drafted because of our religious and natural rights convictions that men are the God-designed protectors of their homes and nation and it’s a violation of nature and its Creator for women to be soldiers. That said, drafting women is also absolutely consonant with women voting.

In the Founders’ era, every voter was required to join in local and national self-defense. That’s a big part of the reason that only men voted at the time (so no, it wasn’t “the Founders were wicked, sexist, KKK,” like you’ve been told). Voting is not a natural right, it is a civil right; which means people’s rights can be protected even if they don’t vote. Women didn’t need to vote to have their natural rights secured, because the laws and institutions of the country protected those rights from the country’s creation, through the state and national constitutions and other organic laws that superseded all others.

Voting was for people with literal skin in the game. Those who voted also had to serve on juries, own property, join the local fire brigade, be commandeered into a posse at any time, and join the militia any time required (which was often). Voting rights did not vest at simply staying alive for 18 years; they were earned through securing the community against violence by not infrequently risking the voter’s own life.

In addition, voting was considered a household act. As heads of their households, the fathers usually exercised that privilege, but so did widows who were heads of their households. Women voted through the representation of their husbands, brothers, and sons, just like their husbands, brothers, and sons were in turn represented by those they elected to the state and national legislatures and executives.

That’s how republican government works — through representation, not direct democracy. The Founders knew direct democracy really means mob government, and they didn’t want that, because it breeds chaos and state-sponsored looting through wealth redistribution.

Not imposing voting duties on women was humane because it’s inhumane to ask a nursing mother to serve on jury duty when her baby doesn’t take a bottle, a position I’ve been in twice. It’s inhumane to ask a young woman to carry a rucksack that crumbles her knee joints at twice the rate of a man’s.

It’s inhumane for a woman to give birth and then leave her baby for full-time physical labor just six weeks later. It’s inhumane to place a young woman in a foxhole with a young man for days, where they defecate and bake in the sun and are susceptible to barbarians who routinely rape female captives. Not asking young, child-bearing-age women to assume the physical defense responsibilities required to earn voting privileges was not sexism, it was magnanimity.

But American women have rejected this magnanimity. For about a century, those speaking for them have demanded that our government make women do everything men do. Well, this is a package deal. It’s not fair for women to get the same privileges as men without also executing the same responsibilities. If women want to vote and be treated in every way by our government as if they are actually men, that includes being subject to the draft.

If you don’t like it, ladies, how about start embracing your womanhood instead of continuing to insist everyone treat you like men?