by Lil Tuttle
A Federal district judge has ruled that the Selective Service System’s male-only draft is unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller in Houston agreed with the San Diego-based National Coalition for Men and granted its request for summary judgment in a class action suit.
“The male-only registration requirement of the Military Selective Service Act, 50 U.S.C. § 3802(a), violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” says Miller’s “final judgment.”
“In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that women could be exempted from the draft because they were not allowed to serve in combat,” reports pjmedia.com. But the Pentagon began allowing women to serve in combat in 2015 – a point argued by Marc Angelucci, NCFM’s lawyer.
“We take the position that if women are in combat then they should have to register for the draft,” the lawyer explained. “There’s no more excuse to discriminate against men because women are in combat.”
The court agreed that Selective Service’s draft registration requirement is discriminatory to men, but it went no further, as USAToday explains:
[T]he ruling came in the form of a declaratory judgment and not an injunction, meaning the court didn’t specifically order the government how to change Selective Service to make it constitutional.
While recognizing that the ruling is “to some extent … symbolic,” Angelucci said “it does have some real-world impact.”
“Either they need to get rid of the draft registration, or they need to require women to do the same thing that men do.”
The final outcome, however, is likely to be far more complicated than that.
For more, read
Q&A: A judge has ruled the male-only military draft unconstitutional. What happens now? (USA Today)