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So what is a draft dodger? anyone who got a deferment?
We have John Kerry who was a veteran, how's that working out?
Maybe find some other criteria to elect a president, perhaps something like experience instead of qualifying as an historic novelty event?
And Secretary Kerry was in a combat unit. It was just the luck of the draw that his boat was assigned to Vietnam's gulf and not the US Gulf Coast like another president's fighter Squadron.
Reading this thread make you think only Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush were qualified to be President in the last 100 years. Everybody else were either the golden age and had no war when they were the proper age to be combatants or are supposed to have some kind of political pull to be assigned to a support unit rather than to the frontline combat unit.
Uh-huh, keep drinking that koolaid.
I LIVED through the era and know for a fact that "student deferment" was code word for I ain't gong to Nam. My brother was one of many who did that. Not knocking, just saying it was what it was. Draft evasion. If the Don is all he claims to be, he'll acknowledge that. Probably he won't.
You are correct!! Also joining the National Guard (you had to be politically connected to even get in) was another ploy to avoid going to Nam! A 1-Y classification was a gift from God (again if connected, a 1-Y could be awarded)!
Drafts presume the state has a right to claim your body and life for it's decisions.
This is completely true for men in the United States. The state absolutely has that right.
There is one exception. Any man born between March 29, 1957, and December 31, 1959, was made completely exempt from Selective Service registration. This group never had to register to any draft board. Presumably they could never be drafted though this was never tested.
That wouldn't be advisable - hypothetically, if the government required every or nearly every able-bodied man in the country to perform military service or got into a wildly unpopular war of aggression, and the people resisted and demanded an end to it, we would be virtually required to elect a draft dodger. There are circumstances where a draft dodger would be necessary, and the American public already do a good job of balancing that out against other qualities of a candidate, so I think banning draft dodgers from running for President is a bad idea.
Besides, the draft is of very dubious constitutionality* because it is a form of slavery. I fully support treating it as such, and prosecuting and punishing to the limit of the law those who dare impose and/or enforce conscription on that basis.
*SCOTUS ruled it legal, but they said the same thing about forced segregation, nationwide stripping of black citizenship and legalization of slavery (Dred Scott), and putting Japanese-Americans in prison camps because of their ancestry, all of which are plainly unconstitutional. The 13th Amendment prohibits "involuntary servitude", and there are few servitudes greater than military service, and forcing someone into death is about as involuntary as it gets; the amendment contains an explicit exception for criminal punishment, so if such an "obvious" exception was thought fit to be included, one would think the framers would have put in the draft as another exception, but they didn't.
If your cause is just, you won't need a draft. Young men and women will volunteer in defense of their nation if the threat is real and not some make believe enemy like Korea, Vietnam, al Qaeda or ISIS. In WWII, the draft was more of an orderly way of handling enlistments than forcing service on men who did not want to go.
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