Martyrs to political correctness

"The dead and injured in that Georgia courthouse shooting," said a friend, "are martyrs to political correctness."

I hadn't gotten so far so soon myself. My first thought was just to wonder if that woman deputy, shot in the face and "critical," saw her "equality" as worth it.

So far there's been not a whisper about the arrangements that led to the shooting. They were short of deputies, it was rather feebly protested. Not a word about the wisdom or unwisdom of setting a woman to guard a 6-foot-1 repeat violent offender already caught trying to sneak weapons into court. The triumphant climate of political correctness has ruled that the sexes are equal, absolutely equal, and no more need be said. To say more, to question this ideological conclusion, is prejudice, bigotry, misogyny.

Time was, police forces had height and other physical requirements; but those, of course, fell by the wayside as discriminatory against the well-known 98-pound weakling, not to mention against women. The idea that such "discrimination" might actually be desirable in a calling in which size and strength could be critical factors was scorned.

A woman friend tells how she gave up feminist preconceptions of "equality" when, as a would-be lifeguard, she discovered she couldn't lift a grown man out of a swimming pool. Not to mention, carry one out of a burning building.

Others aren't so realistic. It seems to be the feminist conviction that formal certification through some kind of loaded training program makes the average woman equally able to weightlift. A woman straps on a pistol and, lo, is the equal of an armed male.

This focus on superficialities loses sight of underlying essential realities. The important thing isn't the pistol but the body wielding it, and above all the mind.

Can it be denied that the culprit's thinking would have been entirely different if he'd confronted a male deputy, perhaps 6-feet-1 like himself? Would he have been so confident of "overpowering" the deputy, so likely to put the question to the test? The average male lawman in such a case, even if the malefactor briefly got his hands on his weapon, would have instantly, reflexively fought for possession of it, or repossession. The woman, so far as appears, was simply "overpowered."

Presumably she'd undergone some kind of training, and felt empowered by it. It wasn't enough. There's never enough "nurture" to fully overcome "nature." The sexes simply are hardwired differently, to react differently to crises. One need but look at sports events, e.g. tennis. Male losers get violently angry, curse and throw things. The women cry. They cry even when they win.

It's nothing for them to be ashamed of. They'll fight if they must, if cornered; but their first reaction is flight, or failing that, appeals for sympathy. Females found piteously weeping in the back of the cave were far likelier candidates for survival than any who tried to fight the invading cavemen in the manner of their own (now dead) menfolk.

Here's the place for what Nietzsche called a "parenthesis for a****." It will be pointed out that there are women who are, indeed, the equals of men, physically as well as otherwise: big bruisers of androgynes, full of aggression, as presumably of testosterone. And conversely that there are, indeed, 98-pound male weaklings, with the dispositions of mice.

Perfectly true; but the chaos of reality can't be reduced to order without generalizations. Meaning, for good or ill, discriminations. Society can be sensibly organized only through such prefatory qualifications as "in the vast majority of cases." In the vast majority of cases men are stronger than women, and so better qualified, physically and psychologically, for jobs involving, or likely to involve, the use of force, to the point of taking life, or losing it.

To ignore such a rule, such a valid generality, for the sake of "not discriminating" against a handful of exceptions, is nothing short of madness. Yet one need only look around to conclude that, thanks to political correctness, it's become a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

The movie "Million Dollar Baby," it turns out, likely was based on the real case of a woman seriously injured in the boxing ring, as in the movie. It was hardly a secret that "No matter how hard women train, their bodies are not made to withstand the brutal punishment meted out in the ring, and they are more susceptible to irreversible injuries than men."

Would any women have even dreamt of taking up boxing if not assured that the sexes are absolutely equal, and what's sauce for the gander is always, unconditionally, sauce for the goose, and anything less is unjust "discrimination?"

The madness has spilled over not only into law enforcement but into the armed forces, the two fields where, if anyplace, you'd have expected sanity to hold its own.

Jessica Lynch was media-blitzed into a "hero" ("heroine" is now politically incorrect) just for being there, where she had no real business being, in harm's way, obliging the army to mount a rescue operation it wouldn't have dreamt of wasting on a male.

Then there was the woman air force pilot trumped-up, at great effort and expense, into a kind of poster-girl for women-in-the-military. Who promptly smashed up herself and her not-exactly-inexpensive fighter plane trying to land it on a carrier. While public statements were full of mealymouthed hints at "engine failure" or the likes, privately everybody knew full well that she was a lousy pilot who simply got as far as she did only because the air force had picked her out to tout its "gender"-blindness, and appease Congressional feminists.

Once again we can sum up with Horace's Naturam expellasfurca, tamen usque recurrit. You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she'll soon find a way back. And you can go on driving her out forever, over and over, learning no lessons from experience, if you're willing to pay the price.