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May 31, 2011 – Republican Representative Trent Franks (AZ) believes that radical feminism is endangering our military readiness during a time of war.

Rep. Franks, a GING-PAC endorsed legislator, believes that faulty ideas of “gender equality” have undermined our military – especially when women are placed in combat.

Current military policy permits women who become pregnant to resign or operate in a reduced capacity. According to Franks:

The risk of women in combat getting pregnant is not merely an imaginative theoretical scenario. Consider the examples of the USS Acadia and USS Yellowstone during the Gulf War. The Acadia was especially notable for having a high percentage of women crew members (about one-third of the crew was female). When the ship returned home from service, 36 female crew members (1 out of 10 women aboard the ship) were pregnant. Likewise, the Yellowstone returned with 20 pregnant crew members.

Pregnancies are a side-effect of another downside of isolating men and women together in combat scenarios: doing so inevitably creates unnecessary distractions and further complicates the situation by providing one more component that can negatively impact morale.

Rep. Franks says that the military recognizes the physical differences between men and women, but ignores these differences by grading physical fitness on a scale. In other words, a woman isn’t expected to be able to move as fast or carry as much combat gear as a man. “This is especially important in life-threatening situations, as a unit can only move as quickly as its slowest member,” said Franks.

Franks observes: “To turn a blind eye to these differences in an effort to adapt to some nonsensical idea of ‘political correctness’ is to be intellectually dishonest and to fail the troops who will ultimately live and die by the consequences of our decisions.”