In the course of saying 13th-Century-thinking presidential candidate Rick Santorum is an idiot, Will Wilkerson says

It's really is amazing how far we've come in such a short time, equality-wise. Within the span my own lifetime, it was thought that women ought to be barred from the Olympic marathon due to the inherent fragility of the female. Now we've got Haywire and an unreconstructed, full-on patriarchal, old-school Catholic, Republican office-seeker saying maybe women shouldn't go to the front-lines because men are too hopelessly emotional.

Source: Big Think Proxy

The context, of course, being Santorum's pretzel logic assertion that no amount of professionalism or experience can possibly prepare male soldiers for the emotional reaction of seeing women soldiers put "in harms way" on the battlefield. Wilkerson correctly concludes that if Santorum was right that men are really that flighty and distractible in combat then the logical thing to do would be to replace them with cool-headed professional women soldiers.

Of course Santorum and his ilk aren't right. About that or anything else having to do with the "true nature" of either women or men. Yet another reason to question his qualifications for office.

Even more proof (if we ever needed it) that for all the right-wing handwringing about feminists being "man haters," nobody anywhere has a frothier mix of hatred and contempt for men than anti-feminists and other gender "traditionalists."

Update: two other things. 

First, my quote above really doesn't do justice to Wilkerson's post. I always hope that when I quote someone that readers will go read the original.  (Hey, I'm old enough to remember when following links to the source was the whole point of "web logging!"

Second, and more importantly to anti-feminist gender discrimination, is the implied assumption that while men would be "upset" if women squad members were injured or killed in battle they must necessarily not give much of a shit if their male squad members are.  Talk about conservative man hating!  Sweet mother of pearl!

Going a step further, what are the odds Santorum & company imagines that women soldiers wouldn't be terribly bothered if their male squad members were injured or killed.  He certainly doesn't raise that possibility in his objection to women in combat.  Which implies a couple of things, the biggest being an assumption that women think of men as disposable or expendible the way assholes like Santorum do.