Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci became the first gymnast to receive a perfect score in Olympic history.
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Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale were nominated for the 1976 Democratic ticket on the first ballot.
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Canada's House of Commons approved the permanent abolition of the death penalty.
General António Ramalho Eanes was sworn as the new president of Portugal.
Aparicio Méndez, age 71, was appointed to be the new president of Uruguay effective September 1.
A border clash between El Salvador and Honduras killed several El Salvadoran soldiers.
An earthquake in Indonesia killed 573 people.
German SS special forces leader Joachim Peiper was assassinated in the village of Traves, Haute-Saône, France where he had stupidly been living. Peiper served only nine years of a life sentence and after various post war occupations, relocated to France under an assumed name. Discovered shortly before his murder, he gave interviews, and blamed the French defeat in 1940 on French cowardice. His house there was set on fire and he died within. His body was found with a .22 pistol in his hand.
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Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 6, 1976. First women at Anapolis.: The first women to do so entered the United States Naval Academy. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II began a "Bicentennial tour" of se...
We ran this a few days ago.
And now we see this article:
It's no secret that Pete Hegseth is hostile to women in combat (one of the very few things I agree with Pete about), but that's not the same thing as not noting this milestone, which is pretty darned close to saying that women don't have a place in the Navy.
Well, actually, it's exactly the same thing as saying women don't have a place in the Navy.
Women have been in the Navy since March 21, 1917, as we noted on the anniversary of that occurrence:
Incorporating women into the Navy has been sort of a peculiar problem in some ways, and those ways are heavily biological, although honesty compels us to note that it's not as problematic now as it once was, or would be suspected as being.
Approximately 75% of all sailors are assigned to sea-intensive ratings rather than shore duty ones. Only about 19% to 20% of the active fleet is deployed or underway at any one time, however. About 20% of the Navy's manpower if female, with that figure applying to both the enlisted and officers. There are instances you can find of ships that end up with a problematic number of female sailors pregnant, but on average only 0.7% to 1.5% of a female crew find that to be the case.
Not that there are not problems.* Having young men and young women in that level of close proximity is going to cause problems. Again, I'm not in favor of women in combat and while I don't think of the Navy all that much, about any ship at sea can be a combat vessel in some fashion.
The Navy changed its billeting policy in 2024 in order to allow pregnant female sailors to find land billets more easily than it had previously, so the Navy, in pre Hegseth Department of Defense it was moving towards being more accomodating.
So what's going on here?
I don't know, but it's part of a sub silentio drift in the DoD. If the Hegseth run DoD just wants women out, or out of some roles, it can move in that directly openly. Instead, it's been sort of just being hostile to them, of which this is one example.
And its not just female sailors, or servicemembers. It's being silently hostile to minorities as well. People who normally would have been promoted to senior positions are not being if they're women, or black, etc. A portrait of a legendary senior black Air Force officer was removed from display without explanation.
Without explanation, it has the appearance of a harassment campaign to quietly discourage women and blacks from joining the service.
And I have to wonder, to some degree, if the DoD is trying to make it through November before it takes a formal step of eliminating women from all combat roles. It can't eliminate blacks from the service, of course, but it's also allowing Evangelical Protestant campaigning in the service, which is hostile to various religions, including various Christian religions. At some point that has the effect of telling Catholic Hispanics and African Methodist blacks maybe they aren't welcome, or at least that they don't want to hang around with a bunch of troops who look and act like Confederate Partisan Rangers.
Or maybe it's not that extreme. Be that as it may, the treatment of women in this fashion is hard to ignore.
Footnotes
*In recent years the bigger problem has been with the Department of the Navy's female Marines, who had to be expressly told to wear shirts while doing PT overseas. Their omission of shirts clearly wasn't because it was just hot where they were.
And, a day after it happened at Annapolis, women arrived for the first time at West Point. 119 women to be exact.
German terrorist Monika Berberich, Gabriella Rollnick, Juliane Plambeck and Inge Viett escaped from the Lehrter Straße maximum security prison in West Berlin.
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The first women to do so entered the United States Naval Academy.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II began a "Bicentennial tour" of several locations in the original thirteen states. As with much associated with Queen Elizabeth, her tour was a huge success.
South Africa ceased requiring black students to be instructed in the Afrikaans language, which itself is a variant of Dutch.
Soyuz 21 was launched into orbit.
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It was the Bicentennial of American Independence and I was 13 years old
There's been some recent focus on people like me who were young during the Bicentennial and who can recall it. Many of us have real mixed feelings about today, the 250th Anniversary.
The celebrations for the Bicentennial were really a big deal. Students, like me, who were in school at the time had been studying the Revolution in anticipation of it. There were events everywhere. State and local governments were very active in promoting it. The Federal government issued a special series of coins.
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In a move surprising noone, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam was dissolved and the former Republic of South Vietnam was united with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam).
The united Communist state changed its name to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Regarding Vietnam, the News ran a story on a US raid to free POWs, but with a twist I've never seen before.
The National Catholic Register went to press with birthday wishes for the United States. Dorothy Day's message was "Repent", a message a valid now as it was then.
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