If I’m not mistaken, the reason women were not required to register for Selective Service was because there was a ban on women serving in front line combat, but if the ban has now been lifted, then what remaining reason is there to not require women to register for Selective Service just like men? Wouldn’t that be gender-equal?
Selective Service should not exist. Gender equality should be established by abolishing it altogether, not by forcing more people to sign up.
I think it would. And I certainly think that if men are required to register (which I’m not so sure of), women should have to do the same. Actually, there’s a woman suing for the right to register. But public opinion matters on subjects such as these. I don’t know the poll numbers on women being required to register.
EDIT: Wasn’t thinking of constitutional challenge/Supreme Court decision now that women can be in combat. Do not know history of decisions, so can’t really comment on that.
Has the ban been lifted or is this hypothetical? Sure, women do actually fight, get injured, and die in combat but I thought most frontline combat positions were still disallowed for them.
It shouldn’t matter. Certainly SCOTUS has made many unpopular decisions before.
As I said in my edit, I wasn’t thinking of courts when I first posted - just congress changing laws.
I disagree with this. If we’re going to have armed forces (and of course we are and should), then I think some large percentage should be draftees. I think it would damp down the urge to send American troops out if everyone potentially had some skin in the game.
I make this proposal as a male to old to serve (56), but with three sons of prime draft age.
And if I got to set the rules, I’d adjust the lottery so that the children (draft the woman too) of the rich and powerful would pick up extra points, instead of deferments.
That hardly seems fair. It’s not their fault if their parents are rich and powerful, and they shouldn’t be punished for it.
Anyway, to the matter at hand, yes, women should absolutely be made to register for the draft, if men are as well.
Assuming a state should have standing procedures to enslave its citizens, then sure, put women on the list too. I think it’s more likely to end than it is to include women, though. Registration only exists because of bureaucratic inertia anyways; it should have ended (again, assuming it’s something that should ever exist) with the Cold War.
Oh, I agree it isn’t fair. My thought process is that the rich and powerful have an outsized influence on policy, so they bear an outsized price.
Althought I guess maybe we could shift the rules so that the draft age shifts up so the R&P are at personal risk.
https://www.sss.gov/Registration/Women-And-Draft
Interesting factoids:
This is a terrible idea for so many reasons.
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You assume that those making the decision to go to war aren’t assholes like Prince Harry who think conscription builds character.
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You assume that those making the decision to go to war are less likely to do so if they can supplement consensual recruitment with involuntary servitude.
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You assume that even if these were true, they are worth the cost of bringing back involuntary servitude.
If you want people like George W. Bush to have skin in the game when they take the nation to war, do that. Throw out the precedent established with Nixon and Ford that the President will not be held legally accountable for crimes against the American people, and start holding them personally accountable when they start clusterfucks like the Iraq War.
For anyone interested in a discussion of the issue in the context of Rostker v Goldberg, there’s a good article from the Minnesota Law Reviewhere (PDF). The author focuses in particular on the extrajudicial forces that played a role in the decision and its aftermath.
The TL;DR version:
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Conscription is slavery in exactly the same way that taxation is theft.
Completely agreed.
I’m not even sure why this debate is even tied to the issue of women in combat roles. If I had to pull a number out of my ass, I’d say that even 25 years ago fewer than 1% of all military jobs were restricted to men. There’s very little logic in not drafting women just because they’re not eligible to do 1% of the jobs.
Absolutely right. The registration ought to be gender-independent. Now whether or not Selective Service ought to even exist is another matter entirely; historically the Federal Government has dismantled the conscription apparatus after each war’s end, with the post WW2 Cold War conscription being an odd exception. And since the Cold War’s effectively been over since the early 1990s, it’s been going 20 some-odd years for no apparent reason.
I’d have thought that if there was ever a point in the last half-century that would have possibly benefited from a draft, it would have been the 2003-2011 stretch when the US was involved in simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was having serious problems retaining troops and manpower. Yet no draft was undertaken, so I question whether a draft is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, barring some sort of large-scale conventional war.
Barring a civil war or some other sort of existential threat to the US that would require the draft to be reinstated, I just can’t see there being any political will to change Selective Service one way or the other.
Now that I can’t be drafted again, sure, why not draft women if they’re going to draft men? Even if women can’t be assigned combat duty, they can do jobs that would free up men for combat duty. Though back in the day, I would have thought “Hey, I took typing! If some chick wants to be a soldier, I’ll happily trade her my Colt for her Smith Corona.”
Yeah, I’m a hypocrite. So sue me.
Update: