My View: Women in battle and gay marriage are wrong celebrations of equality

The same goes for women in battle. Forgive the prejudice of women being less associated with meting out violence and death on fellow human beings than their male counterparts. In some of the better literature, such as French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s "Poétique de la Rêverie" (1960), a female "anima" has all sorts of superiority over male "animus," not least the superiority of convincing over coercing.

Now ‘women in battle’ celebrate exactly the opposite: the right for women to kill and be killed in battle, equal to men. The lawyer can hardly oppose this. Lost in the logic of equality is the superiority of conversation over its lethal interruption with the sword. Instead of celebrating women’s nonviolent anima, instead of corralling and impugning man’s right to kill and be killed as an aberration of pre-modern history, we give in to violence as the legitimate, gender equal, engine of history.

Chibli Mallat is chairman of Right to Nonviolence, a human rights lawyer and Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Utah.