Glenn Reynolds: Draft women? Why not? President Obama and I agree: Equality for women should mean equal subjection to draft registration.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

Will America’s military be fundamentally transformed? Maybe. At least, Army Secretary John McHugh was talking about subjecting women to the draft on Monday.

I’m against a draft in general, despite ongoing efforts by people like congressman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., to bring it back. As Robert Heinlein once said, a nation that can’t defend itself without conscription doesn’t deserve to survive. But that said, if we’re going to have a draft, I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply to women, too. And I’m happy to see that President Obama agrees with me.

In the old days, of course, patriarchy paid. Despite tales of fierce female Amazon warriors, sexual division of labor — in which women focused on childbearing and child-rearing while men engaged in war — tended to make societies much more formidable. A nation could lose a large chunk of its fighting-age men and still bounce back, so long as its fertile women remained.

Nowadays, when war isn’t a matter of hacking at people with sharp objects, that matters less. Women’s primary activity is no longer childbearing, and many women will never have kids at all. And even those who do have kids often delay childbearing until their late 20s or even 30s, long after any draft-induced military service would end.

There’s also the question of fairness. In the old days of “patriarchal privilege,” it maybe made sense to require men to put their lives on the line for their nation. But we have equality, now. Women vote, are overrepresented among college graduates, live longer than men, and so on. The last remaining institutional remnants of outdated sex roles are probably the university sex codes that appear to assume that male students are all violent animals, which seems to be the last acceptable gender stereotype.

Meanwhile, to be conscripted into the military is to be ripped from your home, friends and family, to see your life plans shattered or put on hold and to be subjected to a kind of harsh discipline that civilians never encounter — while being placed at the risk (sometimes the near-certainty) of death at someone else’s command. If men, who have historically been subjected to this, are to remain subject to it in the future, then why shouldn’t women?

In his partial dissent to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that “By restricting the right to terminate pregnancies, the State conscripts women’s bodies into its service.” When I teach this case in constitutional law class, there’s usually a student who points out that the state has been conscripting men’s bodies into its service for years, without complaint from the Supreme Court.

In fact, the Supreme Court has endorsed the draft, holding in 1918 that “Compelled military service is neither repugnant to a free government nor in conflict with the constitutional guarantees of individual liberty. Indeed, it may not be doubted that the very conception of a just government and its duty to the citizen includes the duty of the citizen to render military service in case of need, and the right of the government to compel it.”

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I disagree. But in today’s modern society, I see no reason why men should be subjected to the draft, or to its precursor, registration, while women are not.

This puts me on the same page as President Obama, who has backed draft registration for women. Here’s what Obama said in 2008: “I think that if women are registered for service — not necessarily in combat roles, and I don't agree with the draft — I think it will help to send a message to my two daughters that they've got obligations to this great country as well as boys do."

I agree. I’d do away with registration if it were up to me. And I wouldn’t bring back the draft, either. But to the extent we have either, women should be just as subject as men. That’s what equality means.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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