Español / March 2, 2021 / Edward Hasbrouck / Counterpunch - A Supreme Court case challenging the requirement for men, but not women, to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft is forcing Congress to make a choice it has been avoiding for decades: End draft registration, or expand it to young women as well as young men.

The choice is not between continuing male-only draft registration (which is likely to be found unconstitutional) and expanding registration to women. The real choice is whether to expand registration to women or to end it entirely. Bills for each of those options were introduced in the last session of Congress, and are likely to be reintroduced within the next few months as part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act.

This is a choice about militarism, not a choice about gender equality. Expanding draft registration to women would bring about a semblance of equality in war (although women in the military would likely still be subject to disproportionate sexual harassment and abuse). Ending draft registration would bring about real equality in peace and freedom.

Last year a National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service recommended expanding draft registration to women. But the Commission never seriously considered the possibility of ending registration, despite being unable to come up with any realistic scenario to justify it.

https://nnomy.org/socialmediaoutreach/

In this digital age, we are now firmly in an ongoing and evolving time where social media communications is an essential communication framework for current and succeeding generations in technologically developed countries.

For those groups doing counter-recruitment and youth demilitarization activism, it is an essential tool to communicate with youth inside and outside the school environment. The military has and will invest billions in their outreach to youth on multiple social media platforms as well as making their presence strongly felt in the online gaming channels. These platforms are becoming a powerful resource of both indoctrinating youth into a military ethos that normalizes war and provides all the military services an additional means of expanding their recruitment efforts to reach youth.

Gary Ghirardi / NNOMY – In my years working as a communications consultant to counter-recruitment organizations, now approaching twenty years for the summer of 2021, I have experienced personally and observed the organizing and activism of groups formed by historical peace churches make prolonged and concerted efforts to intervene against the militarization of our youth by departments of defense.

The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth itself is a creation, in part, as a project of the American Friends Service Committee’s National Youth & Militarism Program¹, a Quaker organization that helped organize NNOMY as a network at a conference in Philadelphia in 2003 along with ten other national and regional peace organizations.

In the intervening years, that network grew at its peak in 2011 to over 140 groups nationally and regionally.  In recent (post Obama) years the focus of as many as 65% of these groups has shifted to other issues while at the same time the programs of the military in our public schools have expanded.

One of the historic peace churches most active in direct counter-recruiting activism is the Church of the Brethren and their organization, On Earth Peace² which organized the Stop Recruiting Kids campaign with its expansive social media campaign on multiple platforms. On Earth Peace also sits on the NNOMY steering committee as an observing member.

Other historic peace church contributors that have made efforts to intervene against the militarization of youth have been Quaker member groups such as War Resisters’ International in London and Truth in Recruitment in California. These efforts have been some of the strongest representatives of the push-back on programs of the Department of Defense in the United States and the Ministry of Defence in Britain designed to recruit youth into military service.

Español / Edward Hasbrouck / Resisters.info - On January 8, 2021 the National Coalition For Men, a men’s rights organization represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Constitutionality — now that women are allowed in all military combat assignments — of the law which requires men but not women to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.