Liberals and feminists went to war to put women into combat -- and have wrought tragedy for female soldiers and their children since

Jailed Mom Symbolizes the Rot of War
(AntiWar.com) -- By Kelley B. Vlahos --

When feminists were fighting to get women more integrated into the military and closer to combat 15 years ago, would they have considered taking away children from single mothers so they could go to war a giant leap for "women’s lib"?

Probably not. When Rep. Pat Schroeder, Sara Lister, and their coterie of can-do ladies were ramming their fists against the green glass ceiling of the U.S. military, it was all about peacetime policy negotiations. President Bill Clinton was in office, and the closest things to battle were dropping bombs on Yugoslavia and launching female cadets into hostile, all-male military academies.

Today, those 1990s trailblazers have everything they wanted – and more. Women are serving in combat – unofficially of course, as military police, interrogators, and prison guards in Iraq and Afghanistan – and dying and coming home with the same wounds and scars their male counterparts have to contend with. Unfortunately, these women aren’t celebrated as vociferously in today’s PC-driven media culture as one would think.

But the explanation is easy: the liberals who fought to get them there are now horrified to think their efforts have culminated in a generation of women fighting for a Republican empire-building exercise gone bad. Conservatives, who never wanted women in the military in the first place, don’t have much incentive to point out they lost that political fight and mothers and daughters are getting their limbs blown off in a sinkhole war they championed for the last eight years.

And neither side wants to talk about what the shock integration of more than 200,000 women (11 percent of the total force) into the Long War has wrought: the gender discrimination and harassment, illicit sexual behavior and relationships, heightened tension, sexual assaults, and pregnancies that occur at home and overseas, mostly on the massive forward operating bases that dot the U.S. area of operation. It’s been a taboo subject that neither liberals nor conservatives see much gain in invoking...CONT'D...LINK