Shall I tell you what my first impulse was on seeing the news conference at which Leon Panetta announced how “pleased” he was that the time had come to put an end to “the ground combat exclusion rule for women”? I thought the Secretary of Defense had gone off his rocker.

Why would an otherwise sane man authorize sending women into war? “Poor chap,” I said to my wife, “he’s gone completely crackers.” But then I remembered the stern-faced fellow sitting beside him. It was General Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, looking on with fierce pride and approval at everything the Boss was saying. “Is he off to the loony bin, too?”

J. Howard Miller, “We Can Do It” (1943)

The response of President Barack Obama to the decision was positively rhapsodic. “Today,” he exclaimed, “every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love.”

By shooting and killing our enemies? Is that to be the face of the new Feminism? Women marching robustly off to war? Too bad we had to wait so long. Imagine the difference they’d have made at Omaha Beach. Or Guadalcanal. Or even Vietnam.

So am I the crazy one here? Why do I find the prospect of “moving forward with a plan to eliminate all gender based barriers to military service,” not only stupid and unseemly, but an affront to everything I know and believe about men and women? Is there anyone else out there willing to uphold what human nature and history tell us is unalterable? That inscribed in the very constitution of the human person are differences reaching right down to the very bottom of our being? That in revealing these differences among us, the very syntax of human sexuality represents something we cannot escape, nor should we despise, but ought rather to reverence and respect?

Far too many of us, amid the distractions of ideology, appear to have forgotten, or have chosen instead to ignore, the sheer obvious incommensurability between men and women. In fact, the differences are so profound, so intractable, that not even great big governments can succeed in overturning them. Mr. Panetta and his innovative pals over at the Pentagon may think they’ve come up with a blueprint for perfect gender equality, but like the geometer trying to square the circle, it can’t be done.

Unless, of course, like the villainous Procrustes—who, in stretching out his victims to fit the length of his bed would often have to lop off their limbs—the aim here is quite simply to level all distinctions, leaving us with a one-size-fits-all model. Is that the direction in which the Obama administration is urging us to move? If this is so the outcome will almost certainly take us to a place where all the singularities of sex will have disappeared, so cheapened and debased as to render every role between men and women as interchangeable as parts in a well-oiled machine. Is that what we want?

And this, make no mistake about it, is exactly what the social engineers have in mind for us. We are henceforth to regard one another as no better than neutered objects. Sexuality will no longer be seen as a distinctive and primordial expression of one’s identity, but purely a matter of cultural construct in which the forms and mutations are determined entirely by ourselves.

Sex will be less a mystery to be lived than just another problem to be solved. Nothing of real and lasting interest or importance, not even the least residue of meaning, will be permitted to survive the paradigm shift in relations between the sexes. Whether one is male or female will no longer matter very much under the new dispensation.

Since my being a man, as opposed to a woman, is not anything anchored permanently to nature — no longer subject therefore to fixed diagrammatic limits, but is instead a matter of the choices I make — then it follows that for society to respect my freedom requires that its laws and ethos become as endlessly elastic as I wish to be.

Given a reductionism this ruthless, and seeing it more and more in the saddle, will surely have the effect of collapsing everything into a state of undifferentiated sameness and uniformity. What a boring world we shall then be forced to live in!

It will surely be a closed claustrophobic system whose entire operational mode will be determined solely by function, in which only the parts we play matter. One day I’m a worker; the next day a soldier. Today I cook; tomorrow I kill. In such a role-driven world, being male or female does not compute.

Indeed, whatever natural specificities may stubbornly survive, rooted as they continue to be in the exigencies of nature, must never be allowed to limit the choices we make. Even motherhood must be seen as a product of culture, an accidental arrangement that society really has no business requiring women alone to experience. Why should only they be burdened with wombs and bosoms? Especially now, of course, when blanket permission have been given to fight and kill, bosoms and wombs would only get in the way.

Forgive me, please, but this is not a blueprint for human happiness. I cannot imagine that anyone, male or female (How strange that people persist in being born that way!), would choose to live on such terms. In fact, it is a nightmare world.

And while I suppose we must all expect to suffer the unnatural hideousness of it, the real victims here will be women, nothing in whose feminine body (or soul) will have prepared them for this. Unless, that is, in choosing a course similar to that of the unfortunate Lady Macbeth, they too wish to summon the dark spirits “that tend on mortal thoughts,” and learn to cry out as she once did: “unsex me here, / And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty!”

Do not doubt for a moment but that the spirits of the vast deep will come. They will not mind divesting our mothers and wives, sisters and daughters, of such vestiges of feminine weakness that keep the blood from growing thick, so as to make way for that hard-edged manly resolve we look for in our warriors. “Come to my woman’s breasts,” she urges the spirits, “And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers.”

It was only, of course, “the milk of human kindness,” that Lady Macbeth lacked. But who knows, perhaps like her, they’ll get used to it soon enough. Whether we can do without it, of course, is another question.

Regis Martin, S.T.D. has a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Angelicum in Rome where he graduate Summa Cum Laude in 1988. He is a Faculty Associate of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH, and the author of more than a half-dozen books including, most recently, Stillpoint: Loss, Longing and Our Search for God (Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN). He has written for the National Review, Commonweal, Crisis, Lay Witness, and Magnificat Prayer Book. He is married and the father of ten children and seven grandchildren.

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