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An anti-Muslim retired lieutenant general says that he would not want to serve in a combat role with women because "personal hygiene and the other normal functions" are already "degrading and humiliating enough" without having the opposite gender on the battlefield.

During a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Chris Wallace asked retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin why he disagreed with the Pentagon's decision to remove the ban on women in combat.

"You need to frame this thing correctly," Boykin explained. "It's not an issue of women in combat. Women are in combat already and have been in combat since 9/11, and in fact, prior to that."

"My issue here is mixing the genders in infantry units, armor units and special forces units is not a positive, there are many distractors there, which puts burden on the small-unit combat leaders and actually creates an environment -- because of their living conditions -- that is not conducive to readiness."

Boykin agreed that "some women can meet the standard," but the issue was about "personal hygiene."

"What I've raised is the issue of mixing the genders in those combat units, where there is no privacy, where they're out on extended operations and there's no opportunity for people to have any privacy whatsoever," the retired lieutenant general insisted.

"Now, as a man who has been there and as a man who has some experience in those kinds of units, I certainly don't want to be in that environment with a female because it's degrading and humiliating enough to do your personal hygiene and the other normal functions among your teammates," Boykin opined.

But retired United States Air Force colonel Martha McSally, the first American female combat pilot, countered that the privacy argument was a "red herring" because men and women have been serving together for years.

"You can figure out the privacy issue as long as you have the most capable, most qualified force," she said. "There should be no reason for these exclusionary policies... This privacy issue of men and women being next to each other, it's the same issue we've seen, which is a myth really and it is not a show-stopper."

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Rachel Maddow let Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan have it for showing up in the middle of all of the turmoil going on right now in the Middle East and Africa and just after the death of our ambassador in Libya, at the Values Voter Summit 2012. As she noted, if anyone wanted to know why Hillary Clinton was being attacked along with her aid Huma Abedin, look no further than the wingnuts appearing at this event.

Here's more with a rundown of that from Right Wing Watch: Who's Who at the Values Voter Summit 2012:

This weekend Republican and conservative leaders, including GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, are set to address the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. Last year, nearly every single Republican candidate for President addressed the conference, where speakers denounced gay rights, secular government, legal abortion and the Mormon faith.

This year, Ryan will be speaking at a conference that is playing host to some of the most extreme activists in the Religious Right who have made careers demonizing gays and lesbians, attacking the freedoms of Muslim-Americans and promoting wild conspiracies about President Obama. [...]

Jerry Boykin

Family Research Council vice president and retired Army Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin sparked a controversy when, as a high-ranking official in the Bush Defense Department, he framed the War on Terror as a holy war against Islam. He has since built a career as a Religious Right speaker, specializing in anti-Muslim rhetoric and anti-Obama conspiracy theories. He:

• asserted that “Islam is evil”;
• rejects religious freedom for American Muslims, claiming that Islam “is not just a religion, it is a totalitarian way of life.”
• wants to ban mosques;
• warned Obama is using the health care reform law as a cover to establish a private army of Brownshirts loyal just to him;
• accused the Obama administration of showing “support for the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our government”;
• claimed the bailout of AIG led to the establishment of Sharia law;
• said that American Jews were misled into supporting Democrats by wrongly thinking Adolf Hitler was right-wing extremist;

Along with his role at the FRC, Boykin is also a leading member of the dominionist group The Oak Initiative. In a speech at the group’s conference last April, he declared that George Soros and the Council on Foreign Relations conspired to collapse the U.S. economy in order to help Obama get elected. [...]

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