COMMENTARY: GI Joe courts disaster with GI Jennifer

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.) UNDATED _ Readers of a certain age will […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.)

UNDATED _ Readers of a certain age will remember a movie called”Operation Petticoat,”in which a group of women find themselves sharing a wartime submarine with the sub’s male crew. Filmed in the pre-grunge era, this light comedy reached its most scandalous point when a few female undergarments were spotted hanging from a clothesline. It was a low-blush production, now very much a museum piece.


I bring this up not as an exercise in nostalgia, but to suggest that perhaps this film had a strong influence on the people who developed our national policy of mixing men and women in military service. It seems to have never occurred to these strategic thinkers that mixing real men and women in a military setting would result in such phenomena as sexual harassment, rape, and pregnancy.

Let’s be clear. The much publicized recent allegations of rape, assault and sexual harassment at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and other military installations are immensely troubling. Officers who take advantage of young female recruits should be given ample opportunity to cool their hormones in the brig.

But it is equally clear that a mixed military is yet another case of sexual ideology triumphing over tradition and common sense (which are often one in the same). When you put men and women in close quarters far from home, their first thought is not going to be”How about a game of solitaire?” Add the martial (as opposed to marital) environment and the situation is exacerbated _ unless, of course, you believe that men and women, when facing danger together, are somehow driven apart, which is an idea only a four-star ideologue could embrace.

We don’t even need to go into the problems that accrue once the shooting starts, though one would love to ask the proponents of women infantrymen whether they’d rather have GI Joe or GI Jennifer beside them during a bayonet charge.

Col. David Hackworth, the most decorated combat veteran in American history, recently pointed to less dramatic problems during the Gulf War, when many of the relatively few women paired off with the luckier men, resulting in a serious morale problems for the larger group. Then there are the well-documented problems of pregnancy and promiscuity on the Navy’s”love boats.” Hackworth’s suggestion is simple and reasonable: Limit women to administrative and medical duties, and keep the sexes separate. This is the policy in Israel and Germany, which dropped their mixed-sex experiments after being shelled by the obstinate forces of reality.

We can’t consider these problems in isolation, of course. The sex problem in the military is merely a reflection of our society’s preoccupation with all things sexual. Just the other day I saw a billboard featuring a bare-backed woman, which was, of course, nothing unusual. What made the advertisement notable was that the purpose of this ad was to encourage us to drink milk. When society has reached a point where you can’t sell milk without the aid of a half-naked woman (in a couple of years, there maybe no half about it), one can safely say that we have become sex-crazed.

Meanwhile, those who do not subscribe to what one humorist calls our”open fly”policy are ridiculed. Famed runner Jim Ryun, a devout Christian recently elected to Congress, to give one example, was roasted by The Washington Post because he and his wife actively discourage their children from engaging in pre-marital sex. They make their expectations quite clear, even to the point of sharing prayer with their children’s suitors.


Praising promiscuity and suggestiveness while ridiculing restraint sends exactly the wrong message. Most people are not afraid to enter certain parts of our cities because too many parents have demanded sexual responsibility of their children. I would argue that the societal breakdown that leads to crime is largely the result of too little restraint, as reflected in our rising illegitimacy rates. The body count is undeniable.

In a more chaste society, perhaps women and men could work comfortably alongside each other in the military ranks. But our society is far from chaste. We have torn down the walls of restraint, yet seem surprised that casual sex _ along with sexual crimes _ have infiltrated our armed forces.

We have fired many salvos in the war for”sexual freedom.”Our military, like so many of our institutions, has been struck by the ricochet.

MJP END COLSON

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