Marine Corps Gives “Opportunities” to Women (NFL Still Sexist)

As several news outlets are reporting, the Marine Corps is going to start allowing women to attend its infantry officer training program, and take other steps aimed at qualifying more women for combat related positions. Clearly these changes are being made for political, rather than military, reasons. It’s one more example of Fuller’s Law: when the government is in charge, decisions are made politically.

Things are different in the National Football League, where decisions are made for practical reasons.

Any objective review of the data says that women are less well suited to combat than men, as I detailed in a blog post a couple months ago. This is even more true in the kind of missions the Marines always seem to draw; where physical stamina, strength, and toughness are often tested to the extreme. Yet the political pressure continues to build to give women the “opportunity” to have careers as combat marines.

It’s sad that political agendas are more important to the powers that be than the lives, safety, and combat effectiveness of our troops, but it has always been true to some extent. This time the political pressure is coming from leftist social engineers whose political agenda is to prove that men and women should fill all the same roles in society. In past decades other political agendas came before the lives of our troops.

During WWII it was the vanity of a few naval architects in the US Navy’s design division, and the Navy’s determination to prove that it’s in-house architects were “right,” that almost out-weighed the lives our our troops. Despite the obvious inferiority of Navy designs to that of the now-famous “Higgins Boat,” the Navy was about to deploy its relatively worthless in-house design when a Marine Corps general named Holland Smith risked his career in a political war over the issue. Smith was more interested in getting his marines onto enemy-held beaches alive than he was with bureaucratic fraternal-ism, and ultimately he prevailed on the military to adopt the Higgins boat. 

As for the current move do declare women “equal” to men in ground combat situations, it is clear from the comments being made about it that the agenda is political.  The New York Times exults that this move  “has opened the door to thousands of new jobs for women.” Nobody in the mainstream press is even trying to make the case that this move will make the Marines more effective at killing our enemies; it’s just being undertaken to make the job market more “fair” in the eyes of feminists.

It’s a little ironic that this news about the Marine Corps’ new policies was released right on the eve of the National Football League draft. The NFL is a private sector, for-profit operation, and NFL decisions are made for practical reasons. Women are “excluded” from spots on NFL rosters because no woman could possible have the physical size, strength, stamina, and speed that football players show off during the combines and other try-outs that lead up to the NFL draft each April.

If there is an all-male field that feminists should resent, it’s NFL football. The average salary among players is 1.9 million dollars a year, over a hundred times as much as a Marine private makes. But football is a private sector business, and personnel decisions are made without regard to politics. When NFL teams choose the men who will battle for success on the football field, they make the decisions for practical reasons.

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One thought on “Marine Corps Gives “Opportunities” to Women (NFL Still Sexist)

  • Reminds me of what I read recently from Mark Driscoll’s book “Real Marriage” (commenting on 1 Peter 3:7) –

    “Peter said that the woman is the ‘weaker vessel.’ What that means is, generally speaking, if a husband and wife get in a cage fight, he’ll win.”

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