Worshiping Equality

Stacy McCain has an excellent post on the subject of equality and the drive to put women into the military.

Liberalism’s obsession with equality requires us to pretend that such distinctions as “male” and “female” are ultimately meaningless, and that any policy which recognizes these categories as significant must be abolished in order to prevent discrimination.

This is where the rhetoric of liberalism is exposed as a species of madness. While proclaiming their devotion to “diversity,” what liberals are actually striving for is homogeneity and conformity: All institutions must be equally diverse....

Perhaps the best example of this weird worldview is the crusade for “gender integration” in the military. Liberals believe women must have the “opportunity” to march 12 miles in full combat gear and engage America’s enemies in firefights or it’s “discrimination.”

Unfortunately, this “discrimination” can only be abolished by lowering standards, as the case of Kara Hultgreen demonstrated nearly two decades ago. Under pressure from the radical avant-garde of political correctness, the Navy and the Air Force had gotten into a competition to see which service could produce the first female fighter pilot, which resulted (predictably) in the destruction of a $38 million jet and the death of its unqualified pilot ...

whatever the number of female jet fighter pilots in the U.S. military today, every one of them is stained by tokenism, their status as aviators tainted by the knowledge that they “qualified” only because they were graded on the curve, so that qualifed male candidates were flunked out of training merely to make a way to fill a gender quota.

Nobody in uniform — and certainly no officer who aspires to promotion — can speak that truth out loud, however, and so there is a silent conspiracy of dishonesty, everyone going along with the androgynous myth that justifies the “gender integration” policy.

One can always say that, in a nation of 300 million people, there must be some women who are physically strong enough to endure the rigors required of candidates for elite military roles. But even if we stipulate this, the overwhelming majority of qualified candidates for those roles will always be male and therefore, even if you had no traditionalist objections to women serving in combat, only a fanatical obsession with “equality” could justify abolishing the all-male status of those roles.

Read the whole thing.