Kamala Harris appeared to score big intellectual and political points during the fourth Democratic candidate debate on Oct. 15. She asked a very pointed question in the discussion about reproductive rights, which stirred the women in the house. She asked if there had ever been a law aimed at restricting what men can do with their bodies. She said she had never gotten an answer on the question, and the male presidential debaters could not come up with one, either.
Well, now she's getting one. The United States has frequently had mandatory laws for male conscription into military service. One example is the Civil War, and another the Vietnam War. These laws take not just one portion of the male anatomy, but the entire body in directions men may not want to go, under pain of imprisonment if they should choose not to comply. And if they do comply, the outcome can be worse yet. These compulsory laws require that men report for duty, often with very few exceptions, deferments, or ways out. What frequently results is the maiming of their bodies and even loss of their lives.
Women, please do not think that men do not suffer in the matter of public policy specifying the use and governance of our own bodies. Public law, regardless of moral rightness or wrongness, has and probably always will, do for all genders what women today claim they alone suffer.
Robert Kimball Shinkoskey, Woods Cross
