Fortnight for Freedom, Day 12

In this Sunday's Washington Post there's an opinion piece, "Breaking the cycle of sexual assault in the military," by Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” and Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general, that says an estimated 19,000 rapes and sexual assaults take place in the armed services each year. They are often preceded by incidents of harassment, bullying, and scapegoating by the rapist or assaulter. Then, many rapes and assaults go unreported because the victims don't trust that they can get justice. Sometimes the rapist is a buddy of the victim's ranking superior; sometimes he in fact is the victim's superior.

The opinion piece goes on to call for a new Special Victims Unit system for handling these cases, which I'm sure is a good idea. But my thought is: why in the world are all these rapes and assaults happening in the first place?

Women in the
armed services
are under grave threat of
rape or sexual assault.

Some say that sex crimes are inevitable in these numbers when young men and women are thrown together in the same military units. Allowing women into the armed services is what's putatively to blame.

To an extent, I actually agree. Empowering women, whether in the uniformed services or in society in general, has had huge ripple effects, some of them beautiful and some ugly. This effect is one of the ugly ones.

In this series in which I am questioning the validity of the U.S. bishops' present Fortnight for Freedom campaign, I've tried to underscore the idea that F4F is a not-so-stealthy campaign against women's health-care rights.

The bishops say no, of course it isn't. It is a cry for religious freedom. But Obamacare's "contraception mandate" is the principal bone they've picked, and were they somehow to get the government to roll back the mandate, the losers would be women who work for Catholic-run institutions, wish to avoid becoming pregnant, and can't afford to pay for contraceptives on their own.

I think the bishops have their heads in the sand on the status of women today. I believe they see stuff like the 19,000 rapes/assaults and think the solution is to turn back the clock — not necessarily to an all-male armed forces, but to a world in which the sexual strictures of a century ago are back in force.

I think that can never happen. One, you can never turn back the clock. And two, even if you could, it couldn't be done without disempowering women and returning them to the status of (say) 1912.

Women today are not interested in turning back the clock. That means, I think, that we need a new sexual ethics, a new framework for sexual morality. Catholic. Protestant. Jewish. Secular. Whatever. For men. For women. For everybody.

That new sexual ethos can't happen, I believe, until reactionaries such as most of today's crop of Catholic bishops begin to see that they're throwing their weight in exactly the wrong direction.