Soledad O'Brien Proves That Keeping Women Out Of the Military is Just Plain Discrimination

Impact

Many have been up in arms abouts Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's recent lift on the women in combat ban, and CNN's Soledad O'Brien came out swinging last week when she fooled a ban removal opponent into supporting a racial segregation in the military quote.

After O'Brien read a 1941 remark by Colonel Eugene Householder on the "danger to efficiency, discipline and moral" of African American services integration, “Co-Ed Combat” author and professor Kingsley Browne said, "I think that that’s true ... I don’t think it’s true with respect to ultimate defeat of the United States in a war. I think what’s likely to occur though is the defeat of the United States in small battles, which means people are going to die."

On the subject of the consequences of attraction and sex on the frontlines, Browne said, "Now you were talking about sex, and it was sort of disputed that there was going to be sexual distractions, but large numbers of women failed to deploy with their units because of pregnancy. Large numbers of women are shipped home because of pregnancy. Something caused that pregnancy, my guess is it was sex."

Going back to Householder's comments, O'Brien went on to reveal that she'd just quoted a man from the 40s who'd been against black people joining the service:

"I want to go back to that quote I read you, and you know what that was from? That was from a guy in 1941. And that argument was about not allowing black people in the military. That was his exact argument of why blacks should not be allowed in the military, because it’s a danger to efficiency and discipline and morale and will result in ultimate defeat."

Browne argued that her analogy was weak, as "race and sex" are different and the exclusion of blacks had to do with the social constructure of our country 70 seventy years ago.

"No one thinks that segregation of bathrooms by sex is wrong [now]...that's not apartheid, so the argument about race is different about sex," Browne said.

"It's the same argument about cohesion, it's exactly the same argument about cohesion," O'Brien said before ending the segment. Watch the heated exchange below.