The recent announcement that changes a policy of excluding women from certain military jobs highlights a fundamental question: Who decides?

Our military is all volunteers.  They sign up to protect us from our enemies in the world.  Make no mistake, if they did not do their jobs, great harm would come to us.

The military has a tough job to do.  They have a whole culture, built up over many years, to support doing that difficult job.  Part of that culture is a set of standards – honor, obedience, deference, toughness.  Some of those standards are arbitrary.  Pilots have to be a certain height – not too short, and not too tall.  To win certain positions, you have to get a certain score on certain tests.  Sometimes they reject people who have poor hearing or require glasses.

The bottom line is that those who have to do the job have found that they can best do that difficult job by choosing the right people, with the right skills, temperament and virtues to do the job.  After all, mistakes cost lives.  It is appropriate that those who bear the risks, and do the job get to choose the standards for who will be given the enormous, life-and-death responsibilities of jobs in the military.

This article about combat conditions is an excellent one.  It makes a good case that trying to pretend that men and women are the same is unwise.  It implies that to pretend to treat them the same will cost lives.  I agree.

My point is slightly different.

Our society is becoming a nation of busybodies.  In every area of productive endeavor, from child care to health care, from mining to constuction, people who have no involvement and little knowlege of the activity are pushing laws to accomplish their own political agendas on the backs of the people doing the work. Rather than a free society with private property, we have become a society where we believe that a majority of 50%+1 can impose their will on everyone.  This is the tyranny of the majority that our founders warned us about.

A nation that is in turmoil over the proper role of the sexes is now pushing a political agenda on our military with little regard to the reality of whether it will help or harm their vital mission.

It’s time for the politicians to butt out.  The military is not a jobs program or a social club.  It does not exist for the “job advancement” of its members.  It is a singular institution with a singular and deadly purpose: win wars.

Those who put their lives on the line should be free to determine how the job should be done.  They have enough to do without taking on the added burden of political correctness.