[Reason] "The current disparate treatment of women unacceptably excludes women from a fundamental civic obligation and reinforces gender stereotypes about the role of women, undermining national security."Go on, fancy national commission, tell this #GirlDad more!
"After extensive deliberations, the Commission ultimately decided that all Americans, men and women, should be required to register for Selective Service and be prepared to serve in the event a draft is enacted by Congress and the President."
Go f-f-f-f-f-f-lush yourself.
Last Thursday, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, a body created by Congress in 2017 to reassess the oxymoronically named Selective Service System and brainstorm ways to increase public participation in the military, at long last presented its final recommendations to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In a nearly year-old report whose official delivery was serially delayed by COVID-19 and other distractions, commissioners reacted to our newish reality of having fully integrated female combat troops by urging Congress to ungender President Jimmy Carter's 1980 reinstatement of compulsory draft registration for 18-year-old males.
And, because this is the world we live in now, they did so in the name of equity.
"That women register, and perhaps be called up in the event of a draft, is a necessary prerequisite for their achieving equality as citizens, as it has been for other groups historically discriminated against in American history," the commission concluded. "Reluctance to extend the registration requirement to women may be in part a consequence of gender stereotypes about the proper role for women and their need for special protection."
There is indeed a compelling moral and legal case for women and men to be treated equally under the law when it comes to military obligations. Which is why I, like The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin and most libertarians I'm aware of, prefer the equality of no military obligations whatsoever.
In consequentialist terms, the draft has not been used since 1973, and military capability has improved markedly since switching to an all-volunteer force. But the root argument against pre-conscription is moral: We do not truly own our own lives if the state can lay theoretical claim on them between the ages of 18 and 26. The Declaration of Independence elevated first among our unalienable rights "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," not "Death, on-call Servitude, and whatever else you can Manage in the margins."