Plan B Forum

Republican presidential hopeful and Texas governor Rick Perry found himself trying to explain his opposition to gays serving openly in the military to a 14-year-old girl in Iowa who demanded to know “why you’re so opposed to gays serving openly in the military, why you want to deny them that freedom when they’re fighting and dying for your right to run for president.”

ABC News reports on the exchange between Perry and Rebecka Green on Sunday in Decorah. Green later identified herself to reporters as bisexual.

“Here’s my issue,” said Perry, unaware of the teen’s sexual orientation. “This is about my faith, and I happen to think, you know, there are a whole hosts of sins. Homosexuality being one of them, and I’m a sinner and so I’m not going to be the first one to throw a stone,” he said. “I don’t agree that openly gays should be serving in the military. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was working and my position is just like I told a guy yesterday, he said, ‘How would you feel if one of your children was gay?’ I said I’d feel the same way. I hate the sin, but I love the sinner, but having them openly serve in the military, I happen to think as a commander in chief of some 20,000 plus people in the military is not good public policy, and this president was forced by his base to change that policy and I don’t think it was good policy, and I don’t think people in the military thought it was good policy.”

Re: Rick Perry's latest: sinners shouldn't be in the milita

Perhaps the most poignant story about women in the Civil War is one told in the book Women in War , 1866, by Frank Moore. In 1863, at age 19, a woman known only as Emily, ran away from home and joined the drum corps of a Michigan Regiment. The regiment was sent to Tennessee and during the struggle for Chatanooga a minie ball pierced the side of the young soldier. Her wound was fatal and her sex was disclosed. At first she refused to disclose her real name but as she lay dying she consented to dictate a telegram to her father in Brooklyn. Forgive your dying daughter. I have but a few moments to live. My native soil drinks my blood. I expected to deliver my country but the fates would not have it so. I am content to die. Pray forgive me...... Emily.

Disguised as a man (left), Frances Clayton served many months in Missouri artillery and cavalry units. (By courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library)

Dr Mary Walker, a surgeon in the Civil War, was awarded the nation's highest honor by President Andrew Johnson. The citation reads, in part, Whereas it appears from official reports that Dr. Mary E. Walker, a graduate of medicine, has rendered valuable service to the government, and her efforts have been earnest and untiring in a variety of ways, and that she was assigned to duty and served as an assistant surgeon in charge of female prisoners at Louisville, KY., under the recommendation of Major-Generals Sherman and Thomas, and faithfully served as contract surgeon in the service of the United states, and has devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health, and has endured hardships as a prisoner of war four months in a southern prison while acting as contract surgeon....

Englishwoman, Flora Sandes, published a book on her experiences as a soldier in the Serbian Army in 1916, with a view to raising funds for her brothers in arms. Sandes was initially an ambulance driver on the Eastern Front but managed to enlist with the Serbs, who by 1916 had already promoted her to sergeant-major. She stayed on after the war with the Serbian army eventually becoming a major.

Supposedly, Sandes was accepted by the Serbs as the personification of British war aid, a symbolic value also attached though in another sense to no doubt the most famous female combatant of the Great War: the Russian Maria Bochkareva. A soldier in the Army since 1914, wounded and decorated several times, Bochkareva convinced the revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky in 1917 that a battalion made exclusively of women would shame men grown diffident about the war into fighting.

She recruited 2,000 women out of which about 250 saw actual combat on the Austrian Front fighting together with units of male soldiers.

800,000 women served in the Soviet Armed Forces during the war.[1] Nearly 200,000 were decorated and 89 eventually received the Soviet Union’s highest award, the Hero of the Soviet Union. They served as pilots[2], snipers, machine gunners, tank crew members and partisans, as well as in auxiliary roles.[3]


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The 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment: This unit was the first to take part in combat (April 16, 1942) of the three female regiments and participated in 4,419 combat missions (125 air battles and 38 kills). Lydia Litvyak and Katya Budanova were assigned to the unit before joining the 437th IAP in the fighting over Stalingrad and became the world's only two female fighter aces (with 12 and 11 victories respectively), both flying the Yak-1 fighter.

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Land forces

The Soviet Union deployed women snipers extensively, and to great effect, including Nina Alexeyevna Lobkovskaya and Ukrainian Lyudmila Pavlichenko (who killed over 300 German soldiers). The Soviets found that sniper duties fit women well, since good snipers are patient, deliberate, have a high level of aerobic conditioning, and normally avoid hand-to-hand combat.

Women served as machine gunners, tank drivers, medics, communication personnel and political officers. Manshuk Mametova was a machine gunner from Kazakhstan and was the first Soviet Asian woman to receive the Hero of the Soviet Union for acts of bravery.

Women crewed the majority of the anti-aircraft batteries employed in Stalingrad. Some batteries, including the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, also engaged in ground combat.



Soviet women in World War II

More women have fought and died in Iraq than in all the wars since World War II put together. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq; and over 600 have been wounded and 104 have died in Iraq alone, according to the Department of Defense. In Iraq, one in ten troops is a woman.

dgs49 wrote:Scoots, none of your points is appropriate or relevant as an answer to a 14-year-old girl.

Isn't it interesting how people who have never served in the military are so unanimously convinced that it's not an issue? While people who were and are in the military (other than those who are ordered to think otherwise) are less sure

Just sayin'.