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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Dog, meet tail

Does it occur to anybody else that the more "rights" students have, the less the adults are in charge and the less likely real education is being concentrated on? Those rights now extend to the most frivolous of all school activities:

The Indiana High School Athletic Association's executive committee has unanimously approved a rule change allowing girls to try out for baseball and other boys sports, formalizing a move made following settlement of a lawsuit.

Faced with a lawsuit Commissioner Blake Ress said the IHSAA had little chance winning, the association ruled in February that baseball and softball are not comparable sports and that girls may try out for their school's baseball team.

The 19-0 vote at the executive committee's regularly scheduled meeting Monday formalized that rule change. The rule also allows girls to try out for boys teams in basketball, football, soccer and wrestling if the school does not have a comparable sport for girls.

The rule change was motivated by a federal suit last fall on behalf of Bloomington South freshman Logan Young, whose parents claimed the two sports were different. After the IHSAA ruling in February, Young was allowed to try out for baseball but did not make the team.

Athletic competition is customarily segregated by sex for the very good reason that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses physically, and there's not much to be gained by watching men routinely trounce women in the sports that have most occupied the public's attention. Some girls can compete effectively with the boys in such sports as baseball and basketball, so there's probably no harm in letting them try out for the team, especially if it can help a school avoid that scariest of modern horrors, the Lawsuit That Cannot Be Won.

But wrestling and football? Come on. How many parents are going to blithely send their girls in to get the hell stomped out of them in football scrimmages, even if it does keep everybody of court? If equality fanatics really want to test school districts on the issue, the obvious answer is for every school to have what never seemed necessary before, a girls football team. Might as well

Comments

Bob G.
Tue, 05/05/2009 - 10:58am

And I can tell you EXACTLY when this ALL started, Leo...

1971...!

Age of Aquarius my left you-know-what.

School (K-12) should never be such a TOTAL democracy that the educators become pawns at the whim of the students (or parents that have not brain ONE in their cranial cavity).
Learn FIRST...!
Gripe LATER...!
(that's what the REAL WORLD is for anyway, right?)

;)

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