But a Supreme Court Justice says registration can go on
Even before Jimmy Carter announced in January his aim to resume registering people who had reached the age of 18 for a possible military draft, opponents of just such a plan were preparing to wage war on it. Late last week, as 35,000 post offices were getting ready to receive the first wave of a tide of 4 million initial registrants—all male citizens and resident aliens born in 1960 and 1961—the signup foes won what could prove to be a short-lived victory in the courts. Ruling on an antidraft suit originally brought by four anti-Viet Nam youths in 1971, two years before induction was ended, a panel of three federal judges in Philadelphia "permanently enjoined" the Government from requiring anyone to register with Selective Service.
In its unanimous, 41-page opinion, the court said that the exclusion of women from the program amounted to unfair discrimination against men, in violation of the equal-protection provision of the Fifth Amendment. There was no indication, said the judges, that national objectives required females to be exempted from registration and males alone to sign up. While the court did not deal with the question of whether women should actually be drafted or assigned to combat, it did note that there were already 150,000 female volunteers who "do serve a useful role in the military."
The ruling set the Justice Department scrambling to get one of the nine vacationing Supreme Court Justices to issue a stay order that would suspend the Philadelphia decision. At week's end, barely 40 hours before registration was to begin, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. granted the stay from his summer home on Nantucket Island, Mass. As a result, registration will proceed as planned pending a final decision on the case by the full court, possibly by early fall.
The President had tried to emphasize that he meant the registration campaign to be no more than a sign of U.S. resolve in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Said he flatly: "I am not in favor of a peacetime draft." But from the start, his plan was complicated by the question of whether women should be included. Carter thought yes, and proposed registration for both sexes. But Congress said no, and last June enacted a males-only law. By then the 1971 suit, which had lain dormant for years after the 1973 ending of the draft, had been revived with a new group of plaintiffs.
The Philadelphia suit was not the only problem confronting the Selective Service. As the date for the revival of registration approached, a coalition of 53 anti-sign-up groups, named CARD (for Committee Against Registration and the Draft), was planning post office demonstrations and encouraging people to attach stickers to their forms stating "I am registering under protest." If draft registration survived the legal challenge, it remained to be seen whether the system could reach its goal of 98% compliance. ∎