We’ll get to those questions, but there’s a prior matter we ought not bury under legalistic thinking or utilitarian considerations and which we ought not suppress out of fear of elite scorn. It’s a fundamental truth: A civilized nation does not force its women to fight its wars.

This is a matter of moral common sense. The purpose of the U.S. military is, above all, to defend the public from external threats, so that we can live our lives in the freedom and thriving America uniquely allows. If our wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers can be conscripted to the front lines and forced to become either killers or the killed, then it’s unclear what we’re fighting for.

Defenses of dragooning women into war tend to be legalistic, and they have their own internal logic. America is culturally and legally moving toward a sterile and totalizing idea of gender that allows for no difference between men and women. Pentagon leaders have already embraced thrusting women into combat and erasing differences between the sexes.

The logic of 21st-century America may lead towards conscription of women, but that simply condemns the logic of 21st-century America.

As Charlotte Hays wrote in our pages in late 2016, “combat is a bloody, nasty business that demands manliness. This virtue that dare not speak its name includes the readiness and aptitude for extreme brutality, including the slaughter of another human being face-to-face. A society that forces women to do this dirty job is a society that has lost its way.”

Hays also warned that “Women in combat will mean lower standards.” The Pentagon insists otherwise, but nobody believes it as a practical matter. Men and women are very different, and that entails that the maintenance of uniformly high standards will have politically unacceptable results.

But the ideology that infects the Pentagon and our political class does not, we suspect, reflect the opinions or moral sensibilities of our soldiers and countrymen. If a female soldier and a male soldier were bleeding on the battlefield, would we expect her male platoonmates to conduct triage dispassionately? If they did end up leaving a woman to die — because that’s what America now supposedly expects — what would that say about our moral authority as we battle ISIS and other barbarians around the globe?

Perhaps the best thing about this ruling is that it brings into the light the contradiction between our moral sensibilities and the legal and political pieties of our elites. We don’t expect a quick retreat from gender theory and equity feminism. More achievable in the short term would be the other underlying problem: Selective Service and the threat of a draft.

An all-volunteer professional corps has made the U.S. military stronger. We don’t need a draft to fight the wars of choice that our presidents have engaged in over the past half-century. And were we invaded or attacked, we wouldn’t need a draft then either, because American civilians would take up arms voluntarily, as the enlistment boom after 9/11 showed.

Congress should respond to this ruling with a simple step to prevent the conscription of women: End Selective Service and its clear threat of a new draft. After that, the culture can take up the work of restoring moral common sense.