So we now learn that women might be drafted into the military. The news is a fitting coda to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat, to which I added another.

When I served on the first Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, conservative commissioners warned about this development: that women would be drafted, if their combat exemption is removed, because of equal protection law. In 1981, The Supreme Court ruled that the draft exemption rests upon the combat exemption. Now that the combat exemption has fallen, if the draft exemption stands, some man who doesn’t want to register, or doesn’t want to get on the bus for basic training, will file an equal protection lawsuit.

Amusingly, a teenage girl filed such a lawsuit in July. She claims that subjecting only men to the draft is discriminatory.

Lawsuits aside, equalitarian ideology demands that women be subject to the draft. Listen to Army Secretary John McHugh: “If your objective is true and pure equality then you have to look at all aspects” of the roles of women in the military . . . [then the draft] “will be one of those things that will have to be considered.”

As well, combat assignments will not be voluntary. Joining the military might be voluntary, but assignments after enlistment aren’t. You go where you’re told. Again, given equal protection law, the military will have no grounds upon which to permit women to serve in combat units only if they wish to do so. Men have no such luxury.

So women who want nothing to do with the military will be forced into it. And women in the military who want nothing to do with combat will be forced onto the battlefield. For this, they can thank the radical left, the very radical left that hates all things military and for which a woman’s “choice” is dogma. Soon, a woman who has the choice to destroy the child in her womb will have no choice about destroying her womb with a bullet or grenade.

The left calls this progress.

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should recall Marine Corps hero John Ripley’s testimony before the commission. A Navy Cross recipient for stopping a 20,000-man North Vietnamese attack across the Dong Ha Bridge, Ripley said something like this:

Here is what ground combat is: Ground combat is walking along a trail in the jungle and finding your best friend nailed upside down to a tree with his private parts in his mouth. I don’t know about you, but the America I grew up in would never contemplate permitting women to see that.

Imagine your 20-year-old daughter at Guadalcanal, closing with the Japanese fanatics at the Tenaru River or Henderson Field, where John Basilone earned his Medal of Honor.

This is what Steven Spielberg imagined those battles to look like.

Then there was Okinawa.