#297: Military Draft, Dorothy Day, Eugenics

Military Draft for Women? The U.S. Pentagon has announced consideration of whether gender equality means that women should also have to register for the draft. Republican candidates in their latest debate confirmed that for the sake of gender equality they support this.

We have a much better idea: achieve gender equality by eliminating the draft for men. Let men have a right that women now enjoy.

It’s actually not achieving equality for men and women to have women become more like men, as if maleness were the superior way of life that everyone aspires to achieve. Like, say, having to be un-pregnant in order to advance one’s career. A much better way to make the genders equal would be to have loving and nurturing men be good fathers, intimately involved in the care of their own children, and with the same right to parental leave when need be.

Let both men and women have the right to fulfilling lives that never involve being instructed to kill anyone.

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Hot off the Presses: Dorothy Day A new book of essays about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement is out, coming from last May’s conference proceedings on the topic: Dorothy Day and the Church. CL Board member Rob Arner contributed an essay entitled "The Value of Persons and the Social Activism of Dorothy Day: A Causal Link."

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Eugenics Again As is customary for people who think that a possible way to solve a person’s problems is to kill that person, abortion defenders are proposing that children who might have microcephaly due to the Zika virus should be killed in-utero. Since abortion is mainly illegal in most South American countries where the virus is spreading, they are advocating against protective laws.

But microcephalic children have as much right to live as anyone else. BBC News has given positive coverage to a child and to a recent college graduate diagnosed with microcephaly. As with other disabilities, we are looking at a case of lethal discrimination against perfectly nice people.

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Caveat on Quotations We select quotations of the week based on content. Who said them might be of interest, but we don’t select only consistent-life supporters.

Sometimes, we even have people who are hostile to our viewpoint saying things that connect issues of violence, as when abortion defenders assert justifications based on military killings. We learned early on to avoid confusion by adding a note when the quotation was one of these “seamless-shroud” advocates.

For the rest, though, our bridge-building sensibilities mean we delight in people coming from a wide variety of perspectives and from all over the political spectrum.

We do encourage people to pass along quotations and any other parts of this newsletter. If you want to be sure that you’re only quoting from people whose other issue positions are suitable to you, you’ll need to check them out.

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Quotation of the Week Carol Tobias, President, National Right to Life Committee E-mail message, February 2, 2016 We also understand that the fight for the Right to Life follows certain historical patterns of other great causes before us.

So we understand that when we pass a law to ban late abortions in one of the states, we are paralleling our historical cousins who passed laws to end slavery in their states. When we see abortion numbers fall sharply, we know we are saving lives just as other noble charitable projects worked to reduce life-stealing hunger and disease.