The Bible makes it abundantly clear that when God created the human family, he designed its members to come in only two models, male and female. “So God created man in his own image...male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). There are two genders, and only two, quite in contrast to Facebook’s 58 variants. They are not interchangeable and they are different in every single cell of their bodies.
These two genders are part of God’s created order, which means they are fixed and a transition from one to the other is impossible. In fact, the effort to try is destined to be futile and to lead only to mental confusion and instability and even suicide.
Our culture, of course, is awash in utter folly when it comes to the issue of gender, whether in regard to the military, to embracing homosexuality and lesbianism, or the insanity (literally) of transgenderism.
The military, which is intended to be a lethal killing machine and not a laboratory for social engineering, is a case in point. The Supreme Court this week allowed the Commander-in-Chief to ban military service for transvestites and transsexuals for very good reasons that have to do with overall military readiness and cost.
On another equally important gender issue, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute exposes the utter folly of putting women in combat, in a piece you can read here. The military has been experimenting with this for decades, and no experiment has ever worked. Even the Israeli military gave up putting women side by side with men in combat after trying it for two years decades ago, in the late ’40s.
Gender integration in the military can never work because by God’s design the genders are simply too different in issues that matter intensely in combat like strength, stamina, and endurance. The only way females can meet the rigorous physical standards required for military service is for those standards to be lowered, which, of course, means they are no longer rigorous. Military readiness is compromised because soldiers of both sexes are integrated into military units where they do not belong.
Women who can’t do enough pull-ups are given credit for “hang time.” Day One of the Marine Corps’ infantry-officer training course requires participants to hike for miles carrying an 80-pound load, climb 20-foot ropes multiple times, and scale an 8-foot barrier. Because women can’t meet the requirement, the test which was pass/fail was changed to "an unscored exercise" and female Marines can now hand their pack to a male soldier if they can’t carry it the distance. Our enemies look on and laugh.
And one other issue cannot be ignored. With the sexes integrated into the same units, in close quarters for extended periods, sexual liaisons, rivalries, jealousy, and breakups are inevitable. You can kiss unit cohesion, military discipline, and bonding good-bye.
As Heather MacDonald writes:
A Marine commander who served in Afghanistan described to me how the arrival of an all-female team tasked with reaching out to local women affected discipline on his forward operating base. Until that point, rigorous discipline had been the norm. But when four women—three service members and a translator—arrived, the post’s atmosphere changed overnight from a ‘stern, businesslike place to that of an eighth-grade dance.’ The officer walked into a common room one day to find the women clustered in the center. They were surrounded by eager male Marines, one of whom was doing a handstand.
In 1998, then-Navy Secretary Jim Webb reported that of the unmarried enlisted women in the Navy and Air Force stationed in Iceland, half of them were pregnant and therefore obviously not deployable.
The only real argument for putting women in combat is to qualify them for high-ranking Pentagon jobs. However, the objective of war is not gender equality but military superiority.
It’s time our military gets back to a time-honored understanding of the difference between the sexes and the purpose of even having a military before the damage is irreparable. Again, as we have seen time after time on matters of social and political importance, the Bible is not part of the problem. It’s the solution.
