The new conservative PC: if you oppose women in the military, you’re a bad—i.e., an anti-liberal—person

Below I have reproduced James Webb’s critical statements about women in the military, comments for which the Republican conservative George Allen and the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin believe Webb deserves harsh censure as someone who is anti-woman, disrespectful of women, blah blah blah. Allen and Malkin did everything but call Webb a male sexist chauvinist pig. How pathetic. I defended Webb’s statements and responded to Allen’s and Malkin’s attack on them in a previous entry. The incontestable fact is that the presence of women in the military has introduced rampant sexual promiscuity into the military and sexualized the military as an institution, turning navy ships into floating “meet” markets and factories of illegitimacy. Yet today’s “conservatives” are so delicate, so liberal, that they think Webb’s 27-year-old graphic description of this sexualized military, “horny woman’s dream,” somehow disqualifies him for public office.

Here is the best of Webb:

• “The Hall [Bancroft Hall], which houses 4,000 males and 300 females, is a horny woman’s dream.” (pg. 277, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979)

• Webb referred to female midshipman at Annapolis as “thunder thighs.” (Baltimore Sun, 8/28/92)

• “The men are essentially the same; it is the institution that has changed. It has changed primarily because of female midshipmen.” (pg. 273, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979)

• “Many women appear to be having problems with their sexuality…What kind of woman would seek out the Academy routine?” (pg. 282, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979)

• “What are the other alternatives? We could stop allowing women to attend the academies at all…Or, if it is the consensus of Congress that the service academies no longer perform their historic function of preparing men to lead in combat, but are now primarily mere academic institutions, it would be logical and cost effective to close them down.” (pg. 282, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979) (pg. 282, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979)

• “Tailhook should have been a three or maybe five-day story.” (Speech to the Naval Institute Annual Conference, Washington Times, 4/25/96)

• “And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide those men with combat leadership.” (pg. 148, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979)

• “If Congress had considered these realities when it debated whether to open the service academies to women, and approached this as a national defense rather than a women’s issue, it may have voted differently.” (pg. 148, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian Magazine, November 1979)
  

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 31, 2006 01:24 PM | Send