That in itself spawns favoritism, duplicity, and pregnancies. The inescapable feelings of resentment, competition, and anger that follow create a powder keg of emotions that cannot help but affect morale, discipline, and attention to duty. The Army can't do something that eluded the Franciscans. It can't run a mixed monastery. Everyone knows this and yet nobody talks, which is what allows the feminists to frame the debate entirely in terms of equal opportunity.
Civilian officials talk much but say little lest they offend one or another constituency or lobby.
One might think that feminists would celebrate the progress made by servicewomen. Yet despite Francke's accusations of rampant misogyny, emasculation is the undeniable policy of U.S. military programs today. The pressure on the armed forces to allow homosexuals to serve openly, begun in 1993 and renewed in the context of Hillary Clinton's run for the Senate, is only the most public manifestation of this. One need only retrace the dramatic change of tone in the statements of top military personnel over the last twenty years to discover how much ground has been gained by the feminist camp. In 1976, General William Westmoreland agreed that recruiting women for the AVF would change the ethos of the U.S. armed forces.