(deleted:  double post) 

Judithann,  I suspect that if you are talking about sending women overseas to fight battles whose justifications are, shall we say, abstract, then you are right.  But I bet--and Sarah Palin would know better than I--that if you are talking about defending hearth and home, a woman will stand formidably against any potential intruder---certainly if her primordial grandmother had been raised in those deep, dark forests of Swabia, Saxony, or Thuringia; or settled in later years on the sweet-grass farms of Shennendoah or Allegany.

When did being strong become the be all of existence?  When girly men like Allen Alda, John Frickin' Kerry, and Barry  Hussein Obama became--cough, cough--he-men.

Night, night, amica.  This old man must embrace his darling Morphea.  I'll peek in on Ricochet tomorrow.

Well, yes, the women must be qualified.  I'll grant you that if Fighting Felicia is on the front line just because of some affirmative action bs, then she should be back in the messhall doing kp; but if she really knows how to handle that MG and can keep cool under fire, then let 'er rip.  You see, it's my libertarian side, the individualist frontiersman with his good ol' gal beside him fightin' off those pesky redskins! 

(The real braves, not the 1/32 Cherokee Harvard grads.  H---sBells, I'm 1/64 Creek, as far as that goes!  Nobody can have an ancestor who arrived in Virginia before 1689 and not have some touch of the red along the line!)

You raise issues that must be part of the empirical investigation.  My argument was against an a priori assumption that women could not serve in combat roles.  If they just can't cut it or the men just can't hack it, ok.  Defense comes first.

BTW, I never gave ERA a flying fubar.  The 14th suffices, thank you.

Well, it's a sad day when logic, the very manner by which mind grasps being, appears esoteric (by which, I suppose, you mean "obscure" or even "untrue"). 

To behold a dead body is very sad, but unless you should be a sentimental pacifist, the occasion is not an argument against the necessity of fighting wars in defense of the homeland.  Nor does death figure in the definition of marriage, else in the days of poor medicine, women should never have risked giving birth.

Of course, there is another pan on the scale:  all the homosexuals who have died because mastermen like Foucault felt he could bugger at will and precaution be damned.  And don't tell me that a piece of paper issued by the state will inhibit gay promiscuity.

Draft?  Were we not speaking of a volunteer army?

Possibly.  I hinted before that the final decision should be empirical, which is to say, based on the variations in individual performances, not assumed a priori with respect to a class. 

But the situation with marriage is different because it is grounded in a fundamental understanding of the nature of the relationship itself, that it is not only individual but ethical, the moment when two sexually distinct individuals, man and woman, subsume their bodily impulses, which in nature ultimately aim toward reproduction (even if contingencies betray insufficiency), and raise them to a universally recognized union that contributes to the perpetuation of both the species and the community.

Whether women fighting in the armed forces is a boon is an empirical question.  There is no fundamental reason why woman cannot fight.  All homosexual relations, however, must by their very nature remain sterile.  The concept of marriage cannot logically apply.  The dead-body issue is irrelevant.

I am not certain of your meaning.  That some women want to join their bothers in combat in order to defend their nation, you write of this patriotic aspiration in the same paragraph that you allude to a deviant's desire to confuse the definintion of marriage, a compact founded in biology, spiritualized by an ethical relationship among peoples commonly recognized even prior to the institution of states?

Even Tacitus observed how the German women would go to battle to defend their villages from the Roman legions; but search as I might, I have found no serious example, ancient, medieval, or modern of a state that confused marriage with homosexual concubinage.

Are you privy to some facts that have escaped me?

Your thinking here may or may not be libertarian, but it is certainly federalist.  It is libertarian if you think that, as a matter of fundamental moral principle, the whole phenomenon of marriage in all its ramifications reduces to nothing more than the exercise of individual, arbitrary will and consent.

To be federalist it need not go so far; it need only acknowledge that among the several states, the citizens have the right, through their own constitutional political processes, to set the definitions of marriage.

There may be much, little, or none whatsover convergence between the two modes of thought. 

Political processes, when considered as they operate beneath the cover of the abiding law of the constitution,  are moved by popular will.  There it is not always wisdom but more often  excitment that carries the day.  If the many should be persuaded that the day is gay, how can even the wisest of Noahs persuade them that soon the flood must wash over their hillarity?

Actually, I agree with you.  I tried to show that (at least one) argument allowing having women serve in active combat duty did not at all support the fiction of homosexual marriage.

Just for the record, although I used to consider myself a libertarian, at least of the mild, Ayn Rand/Roger McBride variety, I now consider myself a Constitutional conservative in the Cicero/Burke/Madison mold with certain libertarian sympathies on the one hand but,  following Hegel and Aristotle, an appreciation that the state is as actual as the private individual and that its ethical logic entails certain patriotic duties on them, such as the imperative that citizens must contribute to the common defense.

Women, being free humans, may also participate in this defense when practicable.

Just because I am feeling, ahem, perverse, I'll butt in.  I am far less opposed to having homosexuals serve in the armed forces than I am in indulging in the pretense that they can marry.  A homosexual can fight, and there is a strong historical, "Burkean" tradition of pederasts defending their states, as in ancient Greece.  But while civil unions may, according to popular will, be tolerated, marriage itself  is quite beyond them.  It's really a matter of the logic of biological reproduction in an ethical context; distaste only attends.  Bizarre interpretations of the 14th Amendment just won't do.

I'll have to ask with Mendel how the IDF fares with women in combat roles  (assuming that they actually are on the front lines).  I surely do not support promoting women in the military just for the sake of bowing to some PC mandate; but if my country should really, really be in danger, I'd just as soon have a few Momma Grizzlies defending hearth and home as anybody else. 

When America was young, women did participate in guarding the frontiers.  True, they served informally, in situations that were too fluid for reliance on organized armies.  How they would fare in the more formal structure, I suspect, is an empirical question.  How their potential comrades, the men in arms, would react must be addressed--and not by forcing the men just to accept the fact:  group morale cannot be coerced; it must be earned.  White soldiers accepted blacks not because of Truman's orders but because the blacks proved they could fight.

Bottom line:  if certain women (and it's always an individual matter) can prove they can undertake the rigors, fine.  I bet their "borthers" would treat them as "sisters."  But no mandates!

The Founding Fathers struggled with the two extremes of the British Empirical tradition.  They made a rather decent synthesis, the best praxis yet to emerge.  Nevertheless, they came upon the scene before the dialectic was explicated.  Some Progressives, Johnny-come-lately's, thought they could adopt the latter; but they carried only the mangled materialistic interpretation.

May we soon be rid of the scam. As a universal Man is an articulated unity; as individuals men must struggle with their own negations.

Ol' Moonbeam sure seems eager to push even more job-creators out of the state.   Any bets on how much larger the deficit will be next year?

I suppose I could sympathize knowing that his hands are tied by mandates from the courts and the federal government, but even if he did not support those particular decisions and legislative acts, he supports the progressive philosophy that begat them, so my sympathy runs thin. 

Nevertheless, it's unlikely I'll leave my home state.  I'll just have to buy less in order to avoid the increased sales tax.   At my age, I doubt that anything short of continual civil disorder will force me out.

As to your questions, sir, I fear that few today are persuaded even to ask them.  That modern yet nevertheless perspicacious fellow, George Orwell, has put his finger on the contemporary form of public discourse.  No doubt in traditonal times, language could become fawning and suavely misguiding, the toy of toadies; just recall the laments of Pope (especially in Dunciad), Swift, and Addison; but the dark "art" seems to have conjured even more subtle imps in modern times.  Something about that "grammatology" and all, no?

Ah, another alumnus of that old Burkean High School!  Welcome, sir!

You know, Hegel wrote something about how those who pretend to speak for the universal, the state as the objective moment, must, in an unjust state,  merely plead for their own particularities.  (The logic of this development sounds wierd to those philosophers weaned in the Anglo-American traditition, but eventually it reduces to the curiosities of the syllogism itself, that the extremes, while opposed, are mediated by the middle term.  But that is a lesson for another time, Liebchen.)

The bottom line here is that factions who petition the state for personal preference, rather than for a truly educated desire to partake in the common good, must necessarily come to enter into combat with others who do the same.  That they claim to speak for the common good only renders their actions all the more hypocritical.

Thus Planned Parenthood vs. SEIU; rent-seekers abandon their alliance of convenience and revert to the natural state in the war of each against all.  Hobbes must chuckle even as he weeps.