Do you know who Kamisha Block is?
Why should you?
How about Zandra Worthy-Walker, Princess Samuels, or Alicia Birchett (mother of three young boys)? They are Iraq war dead from the month of August, Iraq female war dead, that is. They join the other 81 American servicewomen who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of the American invasion.
That’s right, 85: more than five times the American female death toll for the whole of the Vietnam War. When the number passes 100, will anyone outside the families of the fallen notice? Doubtful.

I wager that most Americans are unaware that the United States Government assigns women to de facto combat duty. Those who are aware would declare that women should be free to choose whether or not they serve under fire. “It’s a woman’s choice.” Sound familiar?

As in the case of that other grave moral evil involving a woman’s “choice,” feminists like to claim the credit, but the real authors are men. Remember when men defended the weak? Now we send them to their death.

The fact that women are piloting combat helicopters and diffusing IEDs is a symptom of a national crisis of identity. Masculine identity. On the fringe of the crisis is the rising clamor for social approval of men who insist their identity derives from their acts contra naturum. Long before the closet door was flung open, however, the blurring of the sexes had begun. Plenty of conservatives were complicit, if not active. Republican Congressman Senator Pete DuPont introduced the legislation to integrate sexually the service academies. It was hardly a leap from coed schooling to coed combat.

To some minds, coed schooling is at the heart of the problem—-which so-called “religious schools” share the blame with everyone else. They have discarded Christendom’s most reliable means of forming real men: the all-boys’ school. It’s no accident that virtue and virility share the same Latin root: vir, man. In 1929, when Pope Pius XI called the push for coeducation, “false” and “harmful,” he pointed out that an educational system that did not recognize distinct but complimentary sex roles would not produce virtuous, virile men. Sounds extreme only in our contemporary modernist culture.

It is my belief, the Pope was right. A valid criticism of our contemporary culture is that often many men are either savage or sissy. Both exploit women. One uses women for sexual gratification, the other sends women to do men’s work. In both cases they demand of women something altogether opposed to their nature. The never-married thirty-something who has been passed around the office, the factory girl who has been told that it is better for her to increase the manufacturer’s bank balance than to make a home for her husband and children, the coke-addled teenager whose images are enriching Internet pornographers, and the tens of thousands of young girls whom our country has pretended to turn into warriors, are the victims. Especially the war dead.

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Christopher Check, executive vice president of The Rockford Institute, served for seven years as a field artillery officer in the Marine Corps.