Ted Rall for January 26, 2011

A very interesting take on the arguments.

One reason I have heard that we do not let women serve in direct combat is because we do not want to see our daughters come home in body-bags. Well… they already are. A medic is in just as much danger these days due to IEDs and random guerrilla warfare.

Women can fight, and fight well. The person who stopped the rampage at Fort Hood was a small woman who had been shot twice.

The issue also seems to be around the ~60 pounds of equipment the soldiers wear in addition to their gun(s).

I think if they can do it, let them. I understand it’s harder, but then again, the desire to be on the front line of such tremendous greatness I cannot begin to appreciate their honor and integrity. It’s all dangerous… but being in direct combat is … I can’t imagine the courage.

Gays serve, and serve despite not yet having full civil rights as their straight team mates. Women serve, and are restricted from open combat (submarines were just recently opened, I believe). I have seen some truly amazing women; though I understand they are not all qualified. It is a more complex subject, but I think if they meet the qualifications, let them. Not all men want to do it and gender certainly does not prevent someone from killing. Killing themselves, in a statistical average, yes… but women can kill. They just don’t typically go on massacres in the U.S. like men do (there have been several in the news in the past year, though).

bleeep you, Rall! That last panel just made me spit my coffee all over the screen.

“We can provide equipment” is hilarious.

This discussion is sad and sick. Shouldn’t we be discussing how to keep men out of combat rather than the feasibility of including women?

Mattro53- True that.

Tell it to the Israelis.

“We can provide equipment, Senator.” WAhahahaha! Genius, man, effing genius. :D

pavlov, women are better than men at some physical tasks, too – it’s not as simple as “men are stronger.” And when you compare a 5’2” man versus a 6’1” woman, it isn’t true anyway. As it happens, the academies decided to do it empirically – see what happened. Women outran the men consistently on long-haul marathon marches, because their endurance is better than men, for example. The real issue is defining what we mean by soldier, and fitting the person to the job. Driving a tank or flying planes? Smaller is better. Long marches? Endurance matters. Shooting? No accuracy difference between genders I’ve ever heard of. Lifting boxes? Pure physical strength - unless you’re using a forklift!

Allen Willey, it’s supposed to be “Martha Stewart Living”, so I don’t think so. But 303 days is all I’m sure of. I think.

I see it as “Soy Pies” and the bottom right looks like a line drawing of a pie.

Why it would take 303 days, is up to Rall…

Okay then, another observation.

At the alphabetical listing of editorial cartoonists, “ViewsAfrica” used to be at the top of the last column. Now, it’s at the bottom of the third.

Who’d they delete?

This whole pregressive movement is about tearing down the foundations of our country. Its a death by a thousand cuts.No one individual cut is fatal.But in collection will bleed to death.

To be Anglo and conservative you are a hater because you want the best qualified with highest standards possible.

Maybe we should mandate female NFL football players.

Have you seen women fight? They don’t belong in combat because that kind of bloodlust is dangerous to all sides. Oh, no you di’n’t.

I’m enuff of a male chauvinist that I hate the idea of “ladies” getting hurt, but as an ex-GI I can tell you that they are as tough as any man in the field and never asked any quarter.

I have a friend (a girl with a five year old son) in the canadian forces. Another high school friend is in the reserve.

Every time a conservative guy says “he doesn’t want women to get hurt”, he really means “I don’t want to lose my place to some c*nt.”

For some reason, liberal men want women to be their equals, even though I’d find no reason for them not to be jealous like the conservatives.

The weak woman cliché is the worst thing patriarchy carved into women’s minds (even worse than female genital mutilation, if you ask me), and regular feminists are often perpetuating that cliché.

A society that would really want to protect women would teach them to defend themselves. Instead, this society is teaching them to be afraid of every man in sight (portrayed by the mainstream media as a potential rapist) nd stay in their homes out of fear.

Maid, don’t lump us all together. I’m pretty liberal, but the idea of women getting hurt troubles me and has nothing to do with “losing my place”. I’ve been in combat, and anyone who wants my place can have it.

Women are getting killed on the front lines today. If you think relegating women to “safe” locations prevents them from seeing combat, you are sorely mistaken. We are bringing home plenty of women in body bags, and some are due to IEDs, others are due to ambushes by Al-Qaida fighters. Detonations at check points. Our women are dying.

And yes, I do understand that both women and gays serve openly in the Israeli army, I was speaking in an American context, where we haven’t caught up just yet.

And yes, there has been a test done, using first person shooters, that showed that away from men, women are more vicious in combat than men are.

M Kitt as a veteran who is left of liberal, I really appreciate your response to Wrong Turn. I agree with all of what you state in your other posts and I agree that discrimination against women is reprehensible. You’ll probably never see them in my former unit, at least not as gun bunnies, but they would have no problem doing my former MOS (Field Radio Mechanic & Field Artillery Computer Maintenance)

ReasonsVentriloquist, thank you.

I never read her, so nobody can blame me. Or can they?

walrus; I think that’s what a man’s instinct should tell him, but nurture can overcome nature…temporarily. Then again, some say compassion is an instinct; men may want to protect women to protect the children they expect they’ll have with them. Or, in this day and age, they may fake compassion to get female attention.

jrmerm; have you seen the news lately? Ever heard the phrase “missing white woman”? Ever heard all those stupid urban legends? Most of the time a woman is the victim. All that is to sare women and girls back into their homes, out of anything suspicious (like sexual activity, in the “killer with the hook” urban legend).

If they can meet the same standards as male soldiers let them join the infantry, just don’t lower the standards.

TCL: “Oh, all right, but just this once: Did you know that in California there are men paying for support for children PROVED to not be theirs?”

I don’t know the specifics of the cases you mention so I can’t comment, but did you know that in California and elsewhere there are many times MORE men who aren’t paying for support for children PROVEN to be theirs?

I’m not saying that two wrongs make a right, or that the one mitigates the other. But if the system is unfair both the one way and the other, it might not suggest “justice” but it suggests “equality.”