Are religions unfair to women?

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what are the data on the numbers of people trafficked for labor vs. for sex?
Could you point me to a single page on that report? 20 pages is a little much to ask someone to read for an internet argument.

Probably didn't notice it.


No, that's not what I meant; I was pointing out that women are doing the front-line work that they are considered physically qualified for by the armed services. If you, or the army, wants them to do more, they're going to have to change some of the physical requirements.

No, but I've heard them testify in front of congress.



Hang on, now you're arguing that things are unfair because women weren't allowed on subs when we were fighting a naval war, but now they are? Really?
Your problem is with the sequence of history.
Or maybe with the fact that we're not currently at war with anyone who has a navy.

Dude...
there is no draft. There is unlikely to be a draft any time soon, and if there were, women would probably insist on serving too because it would mean that we were involved in a pretty f*****g big war.

I don't think I would, but if you say that it made a difference in your reasoning I believe you.

Good thing that we have an all-volunteer military, then, neh?

See the previous notes about women serving on subs, in air combat, and on the front lines.

I didn't say that I agreed with the MRA types; I said that they oppose feminist efforts to open up the military.

Tables on page 8 and 9. Can't miss 'em.



I'll put it to you here: How is traditional religious culture unfair to women?

If women can dig up archaic things like the scarlet letter, may I dig up breach-of-promise suits? If it's past limits to reproductive choice that are offensive, then shouldn't men at least be given the option to waive paternity within the same trimester-based framework that governs abortion? According to Maureen Dowd, we're obsolete, so that should be no trouble.



You've still ducked the question of how any of this is "officially recognizing the work that women already do on the front lines". How does deploying a woman in a non-wartime infantry role in 2017 do anything for a woman who did support or supply duty in Iraq in 2006?

Besides, how were women unrecognized to begin with? There's been abundant, positive press coverage about women in combat zones during the last twelve years. Compare that to men in support roles, who have been treated downright badly in the past: the Merchant Marine took heavier losses than much of the regular military and kept Britain from falling to Hitler, but the crews weren't recognized as veterans until well after the war. They couldn't claim veterans' benefits until that was corrected, wounded or not.

I also don't remember any special coverage of men in supply convoys in either Iraq of Afghanistan. The coverage of the front focused on whether we were winning or whether the war was just, not on the infantry grunts fighting in it. It sounds to me as though women are being treated better than men have been in the past, and on-par with current standards.



You questioned the definition of big losses. I gave you an example. There are worse ones outside of sub-service if that would be easier. I'd already answered your question of comparability twice. Here it is again: front-line infantry bear more risk than any other ground forces by an order of magnitude. Air- and sub-crews are killed and wounded less often than ground forces. And without that comparability claim, it's hard to see what inequality of recognition there is to correct.



I hardly have a monopoly on digging up old slights that I didn't personally suffer. Your profile lists your date of birth as March 5th, 1976. Roe v. Wade came down in January of 1973. Unless you were fertile three years before you were born, I could say:

Girl...
you couldn't get pregnant.

By your own standard, no woman under 50 has any standing to bring up horror stories about failed abortions because she didn't suffer, wasn't at risk, and almost certainly won't be. Ever.

And if the draft is hypothetical, then so is the idea of women in air- and sub-crews being at serious risk. Neither event is going to happen outside of a major war, and in that case both would.



Agreeing with them? I said that you were hiding behind them, and you are. Besides, your second statement isn't true.

Where did you even come up with that? All of the men's rights activists that I know have signed the petition to equalize the draft. In fact, they're the only people that I know of either gender who were aware that there was one. There's at least one legal action by a men's group against the Obama administration for not equalizing it despite officially claiming that women can fill all roles.

Ok. Looks like both law enforcement and social workers need more training on exploitive labor practices; that table focused on domestic help, though, and I wonder if there would be more recognition of slavery if it involved field hands:
http://ciw-online.org/slavery/
However, that table is addressing whether or not service people would recognize those theoretical scenarios; it does not address the actual percentages of sex trafficking vs. labor trafficking.


which religion?


Both things were based on the idea that a woman's value was in her sexual chastity. One of them affected men as well as women, but only because he had "taken something of value," not because the woman in question was given any actual respect.


I've written about this on PPR in other places, and I'm honestly torn. I do agree that men should have control over their own reproduction, and that they need more options than just condoms and sterilization; if abortion were more accessible to women (a lot of rural areas - now including the entire state of Texas, rural or not - have abortion clinics so far away, or with so many restrictions and waiting periods, that women must arrange for days off of work, sometimes months in advance, meaning that they're forced into later abortions than they would otherwise choose, meaning much greater health risk and much greater cost), I would say that a man should be able to waive his parental rights in the first trimester with the payment of 1/2 of the cost of an abortion. Some girls think that the man will "come around" once the kid is born, and it would be better for the break in the relationship to be unequivocal and irrevocable.
On the other hand, if a woman were trying to set a man up - and I don't think that this happens often at all, but if she were - then it would be easy to just keep the pregnancy a secret until the 2nd trimester. In addition, if the woman decides to have the kid even after the man has given up rights, it's the kid that suffers from having only one parent and the state that has to foot the bill if the mom can't support it on her own.

Maureen Dowd is problematic. To the extent that she's feminist, she's second-wave; 2nd wave is a little less cognizant of intersectionality (ie, the idea that more factors than gender come in to play in driving privilege and class), and since it came about when women were more socially confined to homemaking, nursing, and teaching, it's a little more gender-war oriented than 3rd-wave or intersectional feminism.
A lot of women, feminists included, like men regardless of whether or not we need them.


Oh, I misunderstood the point that you were trying to make. Here:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01 ... ombat?lite
"{Leon} Panetta spoke of visiting Arlington National Cemetery and seeing no distinction between men and women who had given their lives in defense of the country.
“They serve, they’re wounded, and they die right next to each other,” he said. “The time has come to recognize that reality.”"
http://www.article-3.com/with-no-single ... -ban-97506
"We hope that the women already fighting, and dying, on the front-lines, will be officially recognized for the work that they do, and more brave women can follow in their footsteps."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/us/pe ... d=all&_r=0
"The groundbreaking decision overturns a 1994 Pentagon rule that restricts women from artillery, armor, infantry and other such combat roles, even though in reality women have frequently found themselves in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan; according to the Pentagon, hundreds of thousands of women have deployed in those conflicts. As of last year, more than 800 women had been wounded in the two wars and more than 130 had died.
...Women have long chafed under the combat restrictions and have increasingly pressured the Pentagon to catch up with the reality on the battlefield.
...In November 2012 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ban on behalf of four service women and the Service Women’s Action Network, a group that works for equality in the military. The A.C.L.U. said that one of the plaintiffs, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar, an Air National Guard helicopter pilot, was shot down, returned fire and was wounded while on the ground in Afghanistan, but could not seek combat leadership positions because the Defense Department did not officially acknowledge her experience as combat.
In the military, serving in combat positions like the infantry remains crucial to career advancement. Women have long said that by not recognizing their real service, the military has unfairly held them back."
bolding mine.

see above. My understanding is that a female medic who finds herself in combat will neither receive combat pay, nor promotions, nor any ribbons or medals for being there, since women are officially "not in combat."

Ok, tell me what I, as a feminist today, am supposed to do about a sexist policy from my grandparent's time.
I don't recall any special coverage of women in supply convoys, either. I just remember reports of soldiers getting shot an awful lot through their windshields, and lots of IEDs.

I'm sorry, are you complaining that standards have gone up for the current treatment of soldiers, and that women are treated as well as men? That's what it looks like right there.

No. I questioned the fact that you were comparing women being on submarines with 'low' losses to men being forced to register for a non-existent draft (and calling the latter 'worse'), and you responded with data from a war more than half a century ago.

Eh, yes I could. Probably will be able to until I'm ~ 45. What I could not be, is forced to remain pregnant against my will, since I live in a liberal state with good access to abortion providers.

That would only be accurate if
1)the right wing were not constantly trying to roll back abortion rights, and
2)the right wing were not constantly trying to roll back birth control rights and end comprehensive sex ed, and
3)the right wing were not seeing incredibly success on both of these fronts at the moment (see: the state of Texas, the state of Missouri, the state of Virginia... etc, etc, etc
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/us/wo ... tures.html ; http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/09/the-la ... shut-down/ ).

If you look at only two categories, "serious risk" and "little or no risk," then you might have a point. However, risk is not a black and white issue; a woman in a submarine is a a lot more likely to die as a result of being in that submarine than is a man who has never been in uniform but was forced to register for the draft that isn't happening, even though her risk is small compared to someone serving in a sub during wartime. We can't go back in time and plonk women down in WW2 subs; we can only ensure that they're there in the future. And we have done.

How am I "hiding behind them"?
Were women supposed to just waltz into combat as if the strident opposition to them being there was nothing more than a gentle breeze? And, yeah, MRA types (I should expand this to 'patriarchal types,' not all of whom are MRAs) are exactly the ones going on about how women should recognize that they're inferior based in part on the fact that they can't serve in the military, and that women are unsuitable for the military because they're weak/stupid/emotional/whatever slur floats your boat. A lot of MRAs put a lot of their sense of self on the fact that they're men, and that means being better than women.
These guys aren't feminists:
http://nation.time.com/2013/07/25/the-c ... to-combat/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/ ... in-combat/
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/25/opinion/b ... index.html
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/20 ... in-combat/

and some actual MRA perspectives, male and female:
http://manboobz.com/2013/01/27/the-thin ... ntrol-eek/
http://manboobz.com/2012/06/01/mras-wou ... in-combat/
http://manboobz.com/2011/10/01/women-in ... r-vaginas/

Here's an article wondering whether men will be ok with women in combat:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/25/opinion/l ... -infantry/


You mean,"the draft registration"?
You might hang out with a saner bunch, on average, than the ones I see selected out.

I think that it covers both:

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=609.281

Subd. 5.Labor trafficking.
"Labor trafficking" means:
(1) the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, enticement, provision, obtaining, or receipt of a person by any means, for the purpose of:
(i) debt bondage or forced labor or services;
(ii) slavery or practices similar to slavery; or
(iii) the removal of organs through the use of coercion or intimidation; or
(2) receiving profit or anything of value, knowing or having reason to know it is derived from an act described in clause (1).



You're free to pick. I have the most exposure to gender issues in Christianity, but I've talked with Muslim women about them also.



I'm not aware of any Christian sect that allowed premarital sex, even by an engaged couple. I understood it to be about opportunity-cost. Life was short and people lived in smaller communities, so once someone of was engaged, any other interested parties would be likely to settle elsewhere.

Interestingly, it's still allowed: http://nationalparalegal.edu/public_doc ... /Suits.asp



Are you saying that a woman shouldn't be able to have a kid on her own? That's what it sounds like, since the scenario you give isn't different from a woman who uses a sperm-bank.

If you really do think that men deserve the same level of reproductive choice, and you don't have a negative overall opinion of single-motherhood, then what are the competing ideals tearing you? They should both point in the same direction: toward equivalent reproductive freedom for both sexes. If you have misgivings about single parenting, but conclude on the balance that people should have the right, then you're torn about single parenting.



Do you need men at this point?



For what it's worth, I don't think that civilian contractors killed or wounded can be buried at Arlington, given medals, cared for by the VA. It's not just girls who are left out.

Panetta's comments are about sacrifice, not risk.



I'm glad to see this, as much it's possible to be glad about things relating to war. One of my reasons for skepticism is that I've occasionally brought up the issue of equal draft to women. Their responses were usually hedging, so I didn't have much confidence in them. This is much closer, but it does nothing about conscription. (Since you will probably chime in again, see my following comments about risks to submarine crews.)



That's not completely true. One of my riding buddies was an infantryman in Iraq, and his CO was a female colonel who was awarded the Bronze Star. She never left her office. Originally she was given something called the Combat Action Badge. If a mortar lands within a mile of where you worked, it's considered a combat zone and you qualify for it. That's how she got it. She was so upset that she wasn't given a better medal that she went to her immediate superior and yelled at him until she was given the Bronze Star.

I'm not sure whether to be more worried about women who fought and weren't promoted, or women who didn't fight, were promoted, and abused it.



Oh, about what I, as a guy, should do about past hardships borne by women. It's your call.



I remember news specials on women in combat. It wasn't excessive, but that still makes them more recognized than the men sitting in the seats beside them, being shot through the same windshield.



No, but I'm wondering why women are complaining, given how much standards have gone up. Remember that there are still quite a few Vietnam veterans in the electorate. You're asking for votes from men who were spat on by women when they came home, then denied jobs. The complaints by current female soldiers are about respect and promotions. Not all of those men chose to be there. Not all of them were war criminals. Not all of them fired weapons. You are 40 years delinquent in giving men jobs that they deserve. As a voter, why should I expect you to treat me any more fairly? Why should I vote in ways that empower you?



I've found three deaths and 75 injuries since 2002. The nominal total of all crews is 9,702. (71 submarines in commission with an average compliment of 137) That's a death rate of .03 per 1,000 person-years. The US death rate for civilian men ages 18 to 39 was 1.53 per same in 2003, and probably hasn't changed much.

If my data's only half-a-century old, I'm doing pretty well. A lot of feminist gripes are one, two, or three centuries old.



The right wing is succeeding because they were given an opening. Roe v. Wade has been law for 40 years, and it hands all control to women while leaving men with almost-equal consequences. The level of disposable income at which a guy has good dating opportunities is a level at which it's no big deal to take a partner to another state or country to get an abortion. The abortion restriction that I have to worry about is a flat 'no' from the party who controls the decision - something that's a lot more restrictive than any red-state law. You've left half the electorate with no reason to feel any ownership of the issue.



There aren't enough men's rights activists to stop you. If you broaden the category, then you might have a point.

As for waltzing past strident opposition, both parties seem pretty good at passing things with 51% majorities, or even with minorities when the opposition is divided. I doubt you'd have trouble if you had all women on board. Don't put all the blame for it on men.

Everybody, don't buy an ipad.
Ever since the iOS 7 "upgrade," several of my most basic apps have been crashing seemingly at random (Safari and Podcasts), and Safari doesn't keep a memory of work that I've done on one site if I tab away to do research on another.
This goddamn thing now crashes as much as a 90's - era PC running windows.

I just lost half an hour or 45 minutes of a response-post; I'll return to the topic when I'm at a desktop.

Feeling your pain.

I'm writing this on an old Thinkpad T61 running linux and a funky browser called Konqueror. It's been crashing enough that I'll switch up the software soon, but I have to say that it's been remarkably well-behaved about saving my stuff. I don't want to know how manu CPU cycles it spends auto-saving so often, but even after a hard-crash, the browser comes back up with this very same 'post a reply' box, and a copy of what I'd written that has to be no more than 30 seconds old.

Conscription is an outdated and completely unecesary system. It is obsolete, and with ever increasingly advanced technology, the number of military personnel we actually need to maintain the same effectiveness will continue to go down. It shouldn't be about signing women up in the selective service registration, it should be eliminating it altogether.



Unfortunately, the only realistic way for a woman to gain combat action experience is for her to use unconventional methods to pad her service record. And to be perfectly fair, there are plenty of men who play the same ridiculous games rather than earn it the way they are supposed to



I think you could change the word "women" in that statement with the word "people" and it would still be accurate.



They may have had more publicity than the men in the convoy with them, but they receive less that is actually useful. Men get plenty of media time, so this seems like a dead end portion of the discussion.



So if standards go up, you should just be happy with it even if you belong to a demographic that is till treated as inferior?



That was the majority of the American public, not just women.



Because equality is a fundamental issue. If you do not support equality now, you have no right to complain about equality if the scales shift.



Some of them are much much older than that. You'd think someone would actually listen after a while, no?



I do not agree with the current way that men are held equally responsible for an outcome that they have no sya in. However, restricting access to abortions is a terrible idea that will lead to more people competing for future jobs, increased rates of crime, and increased rates of poverty.



So only a guy with financial security is allowed to have sex? The people that are being forced to have unwanted children are the ones who can least afford to have them. I find it strange that so many people would do anything to reduce government spending on social programs, but are perfectly content with idea of adding to the ranks of those who qualify.



Have you paid any attention to the proportion of women in the legislative branch? Our representative government is hardly representative. There are still huge swaths of this country where a female candidate is entirely unelectable under any circumstances.

And?

Had a guy in my squadron who received a Purple Heart because a piece of a rock knicked his cheek when a IED went off. Playing the system isn't limited to females.



Women were the only ones who spat on Vietnam veterans? There were a lot of female business owners in the 70s who denied veterans jobs?

Eh?



I never denied anyone a job.

One would certainly think. Historically, though, numerical superiority has always won the day.

There's a Chinese in every armor, even "impenetrable" technology. If all you rely upon are armed drones, it's only a matter of time before you experience a failure, whether a hacker deploys a virus or you have an internal threat that compromises your tech solutions. Nobody is completely free from sabotage, and you might be surprised how quickly a technological threat evens out the battlefield.

In that event, war becomes a numbers game. We might be drawing down our numbers for the moment, but we have superior training as well as high tech on our side. For now.

Take Vietnam, for instance. We certainly had better weapons and better training than the enemy. If Vietnam had been all about air superiority we'd have put an end to it in less than 5 years. Where we failed was 1) We lost the political war, no surprise since the South Vietnamese government was corrupt; 2) We lost our willingness on the home front to keep fighting and even turned against our own soldiers, contributing to loss of morale; 3) No matter what kind of numbers we sent in, we insisted on a protracted war on someone else's homeland--there would be no end to Chinese or Soviet support if things started to look bad for them in the North, not to mention ideological differences meant there'd be no argument when it came to sending troops, whether trained or conscripted; i.e. they weren't allowed to protest the war even if they WERE against it. They had the means to send every man/woman/child to hold Hanoi if their leaders said it had to be done.

We don't have this in the west. Doesn't matter if the enemy just retrofitted their dead soldiers with steam engines and clockworks and sent them back to the front lines, our resources would eventually be worn down if we proved unable to meet or exceed their numbers and willingness to fight.

I'd propose something slightly different: REQUIRED military training for every single citizen. ALL of them, regardless of religious or ideological objections to combat. ALL citizens would be REQUIRED to spend 4 years on full-time active duty and another 4 years doing the "weekend warrior" thing. IF war broke out at any time AND it became necessary to increase the size of active soldiers beyond the size of a volunteer army, all eligible persons within a 16-year age range--we'll say between the ages of 16 and 32--would be up for random combat selection.

Fundamentally, that's my idea, and there would be some minor kinks to work out. But the MAIN idea that drives this is combat readiness in the event of an invasion. It's extremely difficult to decisively win a war when EVERY SINGLE CITIZEN is a militant. Aside from numerical superiority in Vietnam, fighters were using their experience with the territory as an equalizer to our superior firepower. You can't kill an enemy when you don't even know who the enemy IS. I'd propose a similar battleground landscape for the home front. If every single person from 16 years old to 60 years old has proficient training in armed and unarmed warfare and has been instilled from an early age a willingness to fight if necessary in case of an attack, it will be nearly impossible for a foreign force to succeed in a long-term engagement.

The role of technology is to level the battlefield and hopefully minimize combat losses on both sides. It's a great first-line of defense to prevent enemy forces from even reaching the shoreline. The problem is going to be when two sides are evenly matched technologically. If you have accurate intelligence on where drones, smart bombs, and military aircraft are being produced, a good first step is to eliminate those targets first. THEN wipe out existing tech currently in use, particularly command posts used to operate unmanned vehicles, which makes drones useless anyway. Next take out infrastructure, rendering military units sitting ducks. Then reduce enemy numbers. Then put boots on the ground to force capitulation. You simply cannot succeed without occupation.

When tech fails, and it WILL fail, numerical superiority carries the day. If all enemy citizens are trained combatants, you simply maintain any hold in a protracted occupation.

I am not proposing that we eliminate people from the military, just that we have not realistically considered the fact that a couple of drones can easily replace the capabilities of a much more expensive fighter, not to mention a much smaller support team. We do not need large numbers of trained, combat ready troops to even maintain our current capabilities.

And as for historically speaking, numbers are only one of many contributing factors, and with our current pace of technological advancement, the number of boots on the ground will matter less and less. A large imbalance of technology has historically tipped the scales in favor of the side with better tech, not better numbers. It is why those with iron weapons annihilated their enemies still using bronze. That is huge part of how a very small group of Europeans armed with guns could take over 2 continents full of indigenous peoples. It is why the Zulu nation fell to the Brits. It is the reason that Poland's elite cavalry so utterly failed to defend against a vastly smaller force of German troops.

The only time sheer numbers matters is when the technology levels of the combatants are fairly close. Egypt has the largest land army in the world (in terms of numbers), but you don't see too many first world countries that are even slightly worried.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QZq-wKaBWc[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QslV5asj_yM[/youtube]

Regardless of the legal definition of trafficking, that chart (the one you pointed me to, on pages 8-9 of the prior link) examines hypothetical scenarios and whether or not law enforcement and social services would hypothetically recognize them as trafficking. It does not address the actual ratios of people trafficked for labor vs. sex, and that is the question that we need to answer if we're going to see if the prosecutions for sex vs. labor trafficking are disproportionate.

Well, traditional Islam (as opposed to moderate, modern Islam) is too easy of a target, so I'll go with Christianity. However, I want to know: are you going to say, 'that's not all of Christianity' every time I come up with some bit of traditional doctrine or a bible quote (see the earlier pages of this thread for examples) that shows an unfair level of disrespect given to women?


Regardless of whether Christian sects discouraged premarital sex, it happened (and happens) all the time, especially amongst engaged couples, and especially as the wedding date draws near.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breach_of_promise

So some of it was based on 'dashed expectations,' which I agree is silly; however, a lot of it was based on the presumption of a woman's more fragile ego and on the idea that women are less valuable once they have had sex or even become emotionally attached with a man.
It's not a coincidence that breach-of-promise suits declined with the rise of feminism... surely you can see that that's to the benefit of men as well as women?

Some religious communities still base a woman's value on an unbroken hymen.

Btw, that's one way that pretty much all traditional religions are unfair to women: the sexual double standard. In the Bible, a bride is to be stoned to death if she can't produce a bloody sheet the morning after the wedding, showing that she was a virgin; men were allowed to have sex pretty much without penalty, unless it was with a woman 'owned' by some other man, in which case he was required to pay for property damage.
If an unmarried woman was raped, the rapist's "penalty" was to marry her, basically a 'you broke it, you bought it,' law, because the woman's disinterest in marrying her rapist was irrelevant. If a woman was raped 'in town,' but didn't cry out or struggle (ie, if she has a knife held to her throat, if she's drunk or has been knocked unconscious), then she was presumed to have voluntarily committed adultery rather than having been raped.
In Islam, a woman's testimony in court is only worth 1/3 of a man's; if a woman reports being raped, she's charged with adultery unless she can produce three upstanding male witnesses to the crime to testify on her behalf.


No; I'm saying that women will more often choose not to continue an unplanned pregnancy on their own, if they know for certain that they will be the only person involved. The man was half-responsible for the pregnancy, so at the very least he should pay half of the theroretical cost for terminating it; whether the woman uses the funds for termination or as partial support for the pregnancy is up to her. The difference between what we're discussing above is that women don't get pregnant via sperm banks on accident; they're either financially independent, or have an infertile male partner, or they're in a stable lesbian relationship. In any case, they are only getting pregnant with a lot of planning and effort, and have a way to support the future offspring.


requoting myself from above:



Most 'single parents' are 'parents with sole or primary custody,' meaning that they're still entitled to support from the offspring's other parent. The exception is widows and widowers; having known one of the latter, I know that he had a hell of a hard time of it, even with a great deal of support from his community.


Do I need men? Plural? It depends on your definition of "need." I don't need a man financially, but I have a lot of male family members, friends, and colleagues without whom my life would be much less interesting. I'm not one of the radfems that Aspie Otaku likes to talk about, who want to castrate or kill most men. I like most of the men I meet, just like I like most of the women I meet.

Your argument is 'female soldiers aren't treated any worse than mercenaries'? Really?



When have I, or any other feminist, ever asked you to do anything about past hardships borne by women?

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/30/debunking_a_spitting_image/
A lot of the problems that Vets in general have with employment has to do with PTSD, alcoholism, and drug abuse, rather than bias. That's a serious problem that our VA needed, and needs, to do a better job handling, but it's not an issue of feminism; it's an issue of war, and decommissioning.

You make it sound like a zero-sum game.


you're still missing the point. There is no draft. A non-existent draft is not somehow worse risk than the minimal risk faced by women in the positions that are being opened up to them during peacetime, or the higher-risk positions that are being opened up in the marines et. all in Iraq and Afghanistan.

*snort*
The right wing is not rolling back abortion rights out of some misguided sense of wanting 'equality for men.' Seriously, I can't believe that you're even making that claim if you've heard any of the rhetoric from the anti-abortion crusaders.


Ok. I should have said, 'MRAs and patriarchs.'

51% of elected representatives. Look into gerrymandering and into voting pattern near elections vs. between elections.

Mercenaries?

Fred Bryant Jr., trucker, killed by a roadside bomb
Nadan Audisho Younadam, translator, killed in an ambush
Vernon Gaston, mail worker, killed in an ambush
Roy Buckmaster, bomb disposal expert, killed by a roadside bomb
David Dyess, bomb disposal expert, killed by a roadside bomb
Brent McJennett, communications contractor, killed by a landmine
Arthur Linderman Jr., trucker, killed in an ambush
Albert Luther Cayton, trucker, killed by a roadside bomb
Emad Mikha, translator, killed in an ambush
Tim Smith, trucker, killed in an ambush
William Bradley, trucker, killed in an ambush
Stephen Hulett, trucker, killed in an ambush
Steven Scott Fisher, trucker, killed in an ambush
Tony Duane Johnson, trucker, killed in an ambush
Jack Montague, trucker, killed in an ambush
Jeffery Parker, trucker, killed in an ambush
James Gregory Wingate, trucker, killed by a roadside bomb
Bill Hoke II, power industry worker, killed by a car bomb
Walter J.Zbryski, trucker, killed by a roadside bomb
Joseph Arguelles, electric power specialist, killed when his transport plane was fired on over Baghdad
Vern O'Neal Richerson, construction foreman, died of wounds received in a mortar attack
Mike Copley, vehicle maintenance technician, killed in a mortar attack
Kevin Rader, trucker, killed in an ambush
Jamal Tewfik Salman, translator, captured and executed
John N.Mallery, project manager, killed in an ambush
William Earl Bowers, engineer, killed in an ambush
Owen Eugene "Jack" Armstrong, construction contractor, beheaded
Jack Hensley, construction contractor, beheaded
Roger Moffett, trucker, killed by a roadside bomb
Felipe E.Lugo III, foreman, killed in a mortar attack
Dale Stoffel, construction contractor, shot
Joseph Wemple, construction contractor, shot
Leslie W.Davis, quality control technician, killed by a suicide bomber
Brett A.Hunter, analyst, killed by a suicide bomber
Allen Smith, foreman, killed by a suicide bomber
Anthony M.Stramiello Jr., foreman, killed by a suicide bomber
Reuben Ray Miller, trucker, killed by a roadside bomb
Keven Dagit, trucker, killed in an ambush
Sascha Grenner-Case, trucker, killed in an ambush
Christopher Lem, trucker, killed in an ambush

That said, Deborah Dawn Klecker was killed by a roadside bomb while she was working as a mercenary.

soldiering for pay, not directly under the banner of some nation or in some nation's army, = mercenary.

That's not a pejorative term, it's a descriptive one. Not all, or even most, mercenaries will fight for anyone or any cause. I'm sure that most of the people you list were decent people just looking to make a living.

That doesn't justify the fact that you seem to think that treating female soldiers like mercenaries, just because they are female, is ok. Men and women working for the same company and doing the same tasks should have equal pay and equal benefits.

do you have any responses to the rest of the post?