A tool to punish men

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views February 24, 2003]

Here is another case where a decree, that is briefly and clearly stated, is purposely distorted to achieve particular ends. An earlier example of this phenomenon is apparent in what was done to the Supreme Court decision on Brown vs. Board of Education, a law that initially gave the right to all children to attend schools nearest their homes. We've watched the sorry mess that ensued, as race-mongering mischief makers have spent over 40 years bringing turbulence to the country's education system.

Of another case, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum describes what has happened since 1972, when Title IX, an amendment of the Department of Education, was implemented by President Nixon:

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a simple, straightforward federal law requiring that schools and colleges receiving federal funds not discriminate "on the basis of sex." The law says nothing about equal numbers of men and women, sex-integration, "proportionality," quotas, affirmative action, remedies for underrepresentation or past discrimination, or even about sports.

Reasonable people would understand this law as requiring institutions to offer equal educational opportunities to women, not as making it the federal government's business if more women than men enroll in women's studies courses, and more men than women play football. But now enter from stage left a feminist named Bernice Sandler who took over the Office of Civil Rights in Jimmy Carter's Department of Education.

She picked the innocuous word "proportionality" out of the dictionary (not out of the law), and turned it into a feminist code word for one of three tests by which college athletic departments would be judged as to their compliance with Title IX. She created a new definition for this word: if 56 percent of a student body is female, then 56 percent of the students playing on athletic teams must be female.

This rule is not only unfair but ridiculous because men like to play sports far more than women do. It's a fact of human nature that female college students do not seek to play on athletic teams in anywhere near the percentage that male students do. . . .

During the Clinton Administration, Title IX was aggressively used to abolish college men's sports as well as to create women's teams. In line with feminist ideological goals, the teams abolished were those where men excel, i.e., men's wrestling, men's gymnastics, men's golf, and football.

Colleges have eliminated 171 wrestling teams (40 percent of the national total) plus hundreds of other sports in which men excel, many of them trophy-winning teams. The evidence is overwhelming that Title IX has been turned into a tool to punish men.

The effect on men's sports, and specifically on wrestling teams, is not an unintended consequence. The feminists' intention is to eliminate everything that is masculine or macho, and to pretend that women are equal to men in physical prowess and desire.

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