Congress Introduces Bill to Include Women in Draft: What Should be Next Steps?

A bill was introduced in Congress today requiring women to register for the draft.

If you have been following the issue of including women in the draft, the debate over the issue really began when the decision was made to officially allow women to serve in combat.  The media publicized over the last few days comments by various military generals making statements to the effect that women should now be included in the draft, and those statements were now followed by a bill being introduced in Congress to make including women in the draft a reality.

As anyone who knows me well might suspect, I have always been a big advocate for women's rights in the workplace.  I grew up and started my career in the very traditional Southeast before relocating out West to the much more liberal California, and there is no question that there is a very distinct difference in how the workplace views women in the South vs. how the workplace views women in the more liberal West Coast.  It was incredibly frustrating as a young lawyer starting my career to always be confused with the lawyer's secretary, regardless of how impeccably I dressed, and to have to run through my qualifications to speak with a client every time I was introduced to a new firm client.  And that was just the beginning of the long list of issues I had to deal with in the Southern workplace.  As much as I appreciate my Southern roots, I am grateful for the professional opportunities California has afforded me. I have had the opportunity to achieve career milestones on the West Coast that would never have been available to me in the South.

In light of my background, I've always felt that a male-only draft was problematic on a variety of levels.  I absolutely felt like women should be included in any draft just like women have been doing in Israel for many years.  But now that the question is in front of us, we have to decide as a society if the Israeli model should be adopted here or if, alternatively, we should consider eliminating the draft altogether.  Obviously the idea of the young beauty pageant winner getting killed in combat after being drafted during wartime may be difficult for certain sectors of the American public to accept.   But we have already seen instances of young female teachers being slaughtered in the classroom protecting their students so perhaps we as a society are already prepared for dealing with that eventuality.

This is the link to the story:

Bill Would Require Women to Register in the Draft