Mandatory Draft Registration for Women Heads for a Senate Vote

The Senate Armed Services Committee agreed to include a provision in the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act that requires women to register for Selective Service. 

The bill passed out of committee on a 22-3 vote. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Tom Cotton (R-AR) cast no votes. 

If the Senate version of the NDAA passes and becomes law, this will place us in the company of the seven other countries that draft women (Eritrea, Israel,Mozambique, Norway,North Korea,Myanmar, and Sweden).

I’m of two minds on the issue.

On one level, it is a meaningless gesture to “equity,” a cynic might even say that is the beginning of a period of reparations for the couple of centuries where women were not required to go to war when their country called. The last group of draftees was called up in 1973, and since then, the Selective Service System has been dormant and only useful for screwing over men who didn’t register when they were 18.

While the actual effect is zero, we should take a few moments to consider the effect of drafting women. Sane people don’t believe men and women are the same. Having women in the selective service system ensures that about half of every class of draftees would be women. I’m not sure that we can handle that much equality.

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The implication is that there would need to be a women’s draft and a men’s draft to ensure that sufficient men are available to do the heavy lifting. This leads to the implication that an all-male draft supplemented by women volunteers would work just fine.

I don’t see what adding women to Selective Service gets us beyond pushing the feminist and DEI agenda. 

My argument against drafting women is a cultural one. Healthy societies that aren’t in extremis don’t force their young women to go off to war. I’d argue that just like dying cultures send their women out to be prostitutes, healthy cultures balk at forcing young women into the military. But that boat has already sailed. Healthy societies don’t have a 41 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate. Healthy societies don’t surgically mutilate kids. Healthy societies focus on family formation and they don’t treat random homosexual pairings the same as marriage. We obviously are not a healthy society and this surrender to the false god of sexual equality just lets us know the war to save our culture has been lost.

Senator Mike Lee has announced his opposition.

So has Chip Roy in the House.

Whether this is principled opposition or failure, theater doesn’t matter because the outcome is the same.