As of now, military officials are assuring the public that the physical and agility standards will not be lowered for women who might serve in combat. My first instinct is to believe that is the intention, a good intention, but one which will not last. You can be assured that the standards are guaranteed to be lowered for women, mark my words.
What makes me so confident that this “promise” will soon be broken? Four letters: A-C-L-U. Standards will be lowered for precisely the same reason that promotional exams for police and fire departments are deemed racist, or racially biased against minorities. Now, I don’t know how an exam can be biased against a race of people, it’s never been explained to me. But not enough women will meet the physical standard. And in the same vain promotional exams are accused of being biased against minorities, the physical exams will said to be biased against women.
As I understand it, women are prevented from attaining certain ranks because they do not have official combat experience. With the ban on women serving in combat being lifted, it will open the once closed avenues to success to those who qualify. When women on a large scale do not meet the physical and agility requirements, the military will be accused of operating an “all boys club” full of sexists who want to keep women out of their ranks.
So rather than admitting and accepting that women are not naturally built with physical parity to their male counterparts, it will be claimed that the tests are designed to ensure women fail. This will be seen as a social injustice, and it will need to be fixed. How do we fix it? Well, after the government pays millions of dollars from lawsuits claiming discrimination, the standards will be lowered to avoid further claims of sexism and misogyny.
Sifting Reality 
Damn the unintended consequences, full speed ahead.
I suspect you are right, I hope you are wrong.
I am a fan of this blog. I am a woman and african american and an immigrant but I choose to navigate via a Christian worldview and not an existential worldview. Because of the depravity of man there are definitely prejudices in the world but they ought to be treated as a flavor of sin and not to get stuck in personal victimization. I would also say that God’s character is that he doesn’t create everything equal but everything is equally important to him. I don’t think men and women are equal but God is no respector of persons(Acts 10:34-35). So our premise is that equal and equally important are two different things. The hyper feminists of the world would say equal and equally important aren’t mutually exclusive. But can an average super athletic woman lift things like a super athletic man? I don’t think so. We will risk having the strongest braun on the frontline if we lower the standards. Our prayer should be for salvation so that feminists would see their worth the way God sees them.
Zanspence
I think you’re very right. People all too often confuse “different” with “less equal”. They tend to see people with differences being treated differently and conclude that’s a bad thing. In reality, recognizing differences and developing the advantages of those differences is not a judgement in the value of those differences.
God did create us with differences designed to work together. Its really not a bad thing.
Funny, Faith Proclaimed Blog actually blogged about this today: http://jonsreality.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/theology-of-swing-dance/
Heard a discussion today that sounds as if the repealing of the ban on women in combat will open the door to require women to register for selective service. If this happens, as it now should, anyone care to give odds on how quickly the howls of outrage start?
The feminists have long said women should be drafted too. That is totally insane.