Vision Forum is a wonderful resource for those who are determined to raise their sons as gentlemen and their daughters as ladies (it has been on our list of recommended links since the very beginning). I am now enjoying the title of “Grandpa”, so I am a bit past that stage. The following essay shows modern-day American culture for what it is – dishonorable, barbaric, perverse, and wicked. It is a culture that shakes its fist in the face of God until something bad happens; then we light a few candles, ask God for help, and then put Him back in a box until we need Him again. This stands in stark contrast to the ideals of the culture of the Old South where women were treated as the very special beings they are rather than the industrial/egalitarian system that treats everyone as though they are interchangeable parts in a machine. Is there no sense of shame? Is there no sense of honor remaining in America? The thought of allowing women in combat was unthinkable until very recently.

America the Barbarous: New Pentagon Policy Sanctions Women in Combat

by Elijah Brown and Wesley Strackbein, Vision Forum staff writers

America has become a nation of barbarians.

For more than a decade, women representing the U.S. armed forces have been dying in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have reported on this fact numerous times at Vision Forum, previously highlighting a 2004 front page New York Times article which featured a gruesome cover image of a wounded female soldier, blood running down her leg, with three men surrounding her, screaming. Rather callously, the Times titled the article, “A Routine Burst of Chaos Leaves a G.I. Wounded.” In writing the piece, journalist Dexter Filkins in no way keyed in on the fact that the wounded G.I. was a woman — he reported the story as if she had been any other male soldier hit by enemy fire.

While the Pentagon’s official policy has been to exclude women from being assigned to most units “whose primary mission” is “direct combat on the ground,” the reality has been far different, as was noted in a 2008 USA Today editorial which we previously cited on our website:

On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s policy on women in combat looks like this: Women risk their lives as truck drivers, mechanics and medics attached to combat units. At checkpoints, they do a job that men can’t: search Iraqi women. They fire rifles and lob grenades. And when they are struck by the IED blasts and suicide bombers that characterize this war, they are wounded or killed just as surely as their fellow soldiers.

In other words, the written policy is divorced from reality.

Now policy has caught up to practice, as last week the Department of Defense announced a formal change in policy to “allow Military Department Secretaries to assign women in open occupational specialties to select units and positions at the battalion level . . . whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground.”

This will open nearly 14,000 “combat-related positions to female troops, including tank mechanics and intelligence officers on the front lines,” as the Washington Post summarized.

While American servicewomen have been in harm’s way for more than a decade — with nearly 200 coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq in body bags since 2001 — the Pentagon’s new policy now authorizes women to be officially attached to combat units on the ground, the very goal of which is to engage the enemy in battle.

This is a first for the United States of America, and it is a cause to mourn as our nation’s leaders — in the name of “empowering” women — are now self-consciously placing women in combat units to be shot at and killed as men.

What are we to think of a culture that openly welcomes our mothers and daughters being assigned to the heat of battle to have their limbs severed, their faces scarred, and their consciences seared as they lie beneath a flag-covered casket? Does this “enlightened policy” represent the fullest expression of Woman, as feminists would have us believe?

Not hardly. It represents an abolition of womanhood and the perversion of God’s design. It represents a deeply-rooted rebellion against the natural roles and functions by which God has distinguished manhood from womanhood.

Women are to be cherished as the weaker sex, not exploited to fill the roster of an army. Combat is the province of men, and God calls on men to protect women and children. Men fight when their homes and communities are threatened by wicked regimes and lawless rogues who would despoil their loved ones. When necessary, men carry weapons into battle and give their lives to preserve the liberty and sanctity of those they hold dear.

It is barbarians who place their women in the midst of war’s brutalities to fight as men. This is what pagan tribes in Scotland did before they were Christianized and embraced the “Law of the Innocents,” written by the evangelist Adomnan, which forbade sending women into battle.

Though America possesses advanced weaponry and great military might, we have become a nation of barbarians.

It is high time that we as a people repent of our barbarism — that we cherish our women as women, and call on our men to act as men.

— Elijah Brown and Wesley Strackbein, Vision Forum staff writers

This essay is being discussed on the Vision Forum Facebook page.