This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 28th, 2004.

I'm Keila Brown.

Two elements of the National Defense Authorization Act now sloshing through Congress are pretty

concerning.

One, a more automatic process of registering young men for a future draft, and for the first

time ever, registration for women.

Cato Stug Bandow explains the long hard fight to make it harder to enslave large

numbers of young people to fight and die in wars that often turn out to be, to put it mildly, pointless.

Doug, when I turned 18, I had to register for the draft.

Luckily I didn't, I missed it by a couple of years.

With selective service, and that was the big promo,

and everybody said, oh, it's a good thing to do, you should do it.

Men only. And that's where I sort of got my hackles up. Now it seems at

least a dedicated group in Congress wants to make men and women more equal with respect to registration for the

draft, but they are moving in the wrong direction.

That's right.

We don't want to expand the draft. We want to diminish it. But in the name of equal rights, they subject women to the same indignity as men have been subjected to.

This is the NDA, the National Defense Authorization Act, which is a very large piece of legislation and this is just a few of the provisions that are in that. What is the public rationale for compelling women to

join the ranks of men when it comes to registration for the draft?

Well, the simple argument is equal rights.

You know, in the past when women were not accepted into combat roles, you could argue

that we need men because men do the fighting.

...