Those three guys in the Aurora theater raised the bar for gender equality

Apparently a controversy erupted after a tweet by James Taranto about the three men at the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre who sacrificed their lives to save their girlfriends.  Taranto said, "I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice."

So was he too unsympathetic? Many thought so and hammered him with their own tweets. He responded with a reasonable explanation:

What makes the stories of Jansen Young, Samantha Yowler and Amanda Lindgren especially poignant is that their boyfriends' dying acts simultaneously dealt them an unfathomable loss and gave them an invaluable gift--a gift of life. ...

These three women owe their lives to their men. That debt can never be repaid in kind, because life is for the living and cannot be returned to the dead. The closest they can come to redeeming it is to use the gift of their survival well--to live good, full, happy lives.

A few times a year we hear feminists complain that women are underpaid in comparison to men. These claims generally fall short of persuasion when we acknowledge the gender differences in job danger, hours worked or physical demand.

Forget that. Those brave men at the Century 16 theater set a new standard. We'll have genuine gender equality when there are an equal number of women sacrificing their lives so that men might live.

Meanwhile, if they aren't doing it already, our military trainers need to figure out a politically correct way to get males to unlearn any instinct they might have to save females at the expense of others or the mission.

Comments

[Rob O.]

Sweet mercy, is there no value in chivalry itself? I do view my wife as my equal and yet, given the same unfathomable situation as these men, I hope that I too would be able to make just such a sacrifice. Part and parcel with the privilege of having a family, is a man's obligation to protect said.

[Geo]

Rob O, you've got a bargaining chip. You can find out how much it's worth the next time chores come up.

Example: Husband/boyfriend agrees to take a bullet for wife/girlfriend during month of August if she'll mow the lawn during that same time span.