In 2014, the Obama administration sued the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) for treating women equally.
Yes, you read that right.
The problem: Female applicants were failing the PSP physical fitness test at a higher rate than did their male counterparts. It didn’t matter, either, that the standards had already been laughably dumbed down. (Example: Candidates only had to complete 13 pushups — with no time limit.)
This is a now old story, too. In the name of Equality™, police departments have for decades been lowering standards to grease the skids for female cops. But, says one commentator, this must end. We should apply the “Hegseth doctrine” to not just the military, but female police candidates as well.
Regarding this “doctrine,” at issue are comments Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made during a now-famous September 30 speech. Addressing top military brass, he insisted that requirements for every combat position return “to the highest male standard.” Reporting on the speech last Wednesday, Military.com provided detail, writing:
[Hegseth] said that “if that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it”….
“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape, or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” he said. “This job is life and death. Standards must be met.”
The same could be said of police forces: Standards matter — a lot. Making this point Friday, commentator Robert Arvay states that the lowering of police standards (which has been more profound than even in the military) must be reversed. As he writes, making the case:
The nation was witness to the well-meaning but unqualified women of the Secret Service who valiantly tried to protect President Trump from a would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania. All of them were obviously too short to adequately shield him with their bodies, as their duty requires, and at least one of them could not properly handle her weapon. The failure of the Secret Service was so spectacular that its director, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned. Her diversity goals had been met, at the expense of the mission, and possibly at the cost of the life of an innocent man who had been killed protecting his family.
Diversity can be fatal.
The nation has also witnessed, for years, televised videos of nonfederal police women who clearly could not do their job due to their physical inability to overpower a resisting male suspect. Numerous videos, including those on so-called reality shows, depict women who could not chase down a fleeing male suspect, nor successfully wrestle one if she did catch him. When assisting male officers to effect an arrest, the typical contribution of the female was to grasp the ankles of a handcuffed perpetrator as he was lifted and carried by male officers.
In one incident, a male broke the grasp of two police women and escaped. (He was arrested days later.) In another, a pear-shaped police woman was unable to cross a waist-high fence, while the subject of her command to stop dismissively ignored her and casually walked away untouched.
I myself made a video (below) illustrating the problem, comedically, last year. It opens with an example of art imitating life and then transitions to life imitating lunacy.
The consequences of this “stylish” policing hiring, however, can be deadly. Just consider the 1992 case in which a bank robber escaped his cuffs and overpowered the female marshal guarding him. He then took her firearm and, while trying to escape, murdered another marshal and a court security officer.
And how did we get here? How did we reach a point where the PSP could be sued for treating women equally? The answer is moral-corruption-enabled “disparate impact” theory.
Applied by courts for decades now, it states that if “protected groups” perform worse on a test than other (apparently unprotected) groups, that test can be declared unjustly discriminatory. On this basis, height and other requirements, once standard for police, were eliminated starting in the ’70s. A major motivation, of course, was increasing law enforcement’s “female representation.”
A relevant question about this is rarely asked, however: Why does “equal representation” matter at all? Does it matter that 92 percent of workplace deaths involve men or that female fashion models out-earn their male counterparts? Must these “injustices” be equalized? Disparities are the norm in life, not the exception.
Moreover, what if we went even further and again embraced the once-ubiquitous standard that only men may become cops? Oh, we mustn’t engage in sex discrimination, some may say? Not so fast.
We already do.
While men must register for the draft, women don’t have to. So the greatest sacrifice we can be asked to make for our country — to fight, bleed, and possibly die — is required only of men.
Accepting this means something — that is, that “equality” claims go out the window. And then we should ask: What other sex-oriented double standards are desirable and acceptable?
As to this, you don’t have your cat tow a wagon or your horse catch a mouse. Likewise, women and men have different roles, too. And what of replacing men with women in law enforcement? It’s like spending money training Chihuahuas to be guard dogs when German shepherds are readily available. You could do it, I’m sure. But why would you?
We’ve long had lower and upper age limits for the military and police without hand-wringing that it might be “ageism.” Given this, should sex limits be considered sexism?
This may be an outside-the-Overton-Window question, but that doesn’t make it invalid. It only means that I may be asking it 50 years too late — or 20 years too soon.