When the law banning women from service in combat units was repealed, liberal politicians and feminists cheered. “Equal rights!” they said. “Women are just as strong as men!” they said. Current and former soldiers spoke out in great numbers, listing reasons that introducing women to high stress situations might not be advisable.

I myself posted an article at Misfit Politics (which I have reprinted below for the sake of convenience) detailing the purpose of discrimination in the Armed Forces – to ensure that we have the strongest possible force available to defend our nation.

And I posed a question: what happens when women prove to be physically incapable of meeting the standards already in place for all-male combat units? Will it end there? Of course it won’t.

And it hasn’t.

Twenty-nine women so far have attempted the Marine Corps Officer Infantry Course, and none have made it to graduation. In fact, “only four women have made it beyond the first day of the course, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test.”

This failure to successfully turn out women who are trained in combat leadership roles has lessened the Corps’ chances of compliance with orders that mandate women “be integrated into combat roles by January 2016 or provide a research-based reason why they can’t.”

To me, the response is obvious: the women who have attempted to pass the Officer Infantry Course are providing data for a practical research-based study that proves what the non-politically motivated already knew: the reality is that the majority of women are not a good fit for close combat operations.

However, interest groups in Washington DC such as the radical feminist group the Service Women’s Action Network are already generating buzz about the need to lower the standards in order to pave the way for more women in combat units.

It should be mentioned that the Marine Corps women who attempted the course are not among those demanding lowered standards. “It would entirely undercut the value of their achievement and diminish the overall fighting capacity of the Marine Corps. These officers are Marines first and individuals second. They want to succeed on fair terms.”

But what the military wants, and ultimately what is the best course of action for both the soldiers and the citizens they defend, is often at odds with what progressive groups and political activists fight to achieve in the name of “equality.”