Feminists have launched a devious attack on the U.S. Armed Services that could have a detrimental effect on morale, retention and recruitment. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a collegiate wrestler at Princeton University, and now we will see if he is man enough to stand up to feminists.

In 2004, Rep. Louise McIntosh Slaughter, D-N.Y., introduced a bill of over 100 pages to authorize a high-level Office of the Victim Advocate in the Department of Defense. Fortunately, it didn't pass.
In 2005, congressional feminists sponsored a four-page version of the same bill, which likewise went nowhere.

But feminists are resourceful. They have persuaded the Department of Defense Office of Military Community and Family Policy to award a contract to Wellesley College Centers for Women to make recommendations about establishing an Office of the Victim Advocate in the Pentagon.

The recommendations are wholly predictable - they would be based on Slaughter's failed legislation. They will call for setting up an Office of Victim Advocate in Washington to provide feminists who major in women's studies with tax-funded jobs from which they can pursue worldwide feminist goals in the Armed Services and destroy the career of any man who stands in a woman's way.

A Pentagon Office of the Victim Advocate would soon become an out-of-control agency working to implement feminist beliefs, i.e., men are batterers and women are victims, a woman's complaint or he said-she said allegation must be accepted as valid and acted upon while no presumption of innocence is granted to the man, the definition of domestic violence does not have to be violent or even physical and the complaining woman must be provided with free legal and "victim services" while the man is on his own to find and hire a lawyer willing to challenge feminist anti-male orthodoxy.

Wellesley's recommendations will doubtless include many of the details spelled out in the original Slaughter bill, such as a rule that no military man can be eligible for promotion if he has received any adverse personnel action relating to sexual misconduct or domestic violence. Another caveat is that arrest and prosecution of the man must go forward even if there is no visible indication of injury and even if the victim opposes prosecution.

Surely Wellesley will copy portions of the Slaughter bill that authorize feminist pork. The victim is to be provided a victim advocate, a victim counselor and victim support liaison, and lucrative contracts are to be awarded to the domestic-violence service industry to train the Defense Department on how to support self-proclaimed victims.

Violence against women should, of course, be aggressively prosecuted. But there is no justice when the government accepts feminist dogma that the woman is always right while the man is always wrong. Rumsfeld needs to understand that the civilian domestic-violence lobby uses a definition of domestic violence that includes facial gestures, perceived insults, put-downs, embarrassments, and other annoyances and disagreements.

Another portion of the Slaughter bill that will probably turn up in Wellesley's recommendations is the prohibition against providing "couple counseling or mediation." The Slaughter bill also includes the requirement that the man must sign a release to allow private information on his case to be given to 14 different agencies. Continued...