Some activists would like to bring Title IX's gender-based discrimination to whole new arena: America’s high schools.
This coming fall, over a hundred James Madison University athletes – including both men’s and women’s national champions – won’t be suiting up for competition like they did last year.
That's because earlier this month the university officially cut seven men’s and three women’s teams to comply with Title IX’s dubious “balancing requirements.”
The school decided there will be no more swimming or wrestling for men and no more fencing or archery for women, simply to make the percentage of women athletes reflect the percentage of the overall female student population.
While this type of gender-based discrimination – ironically something Title IX was enacted to prohibit – is not new on the collegiate level, some activists would like to see it applied in a whole new arena: America’s high schools.
As originally written, Title IX is a good law. Its explicit purpose is to ensure that all students have equal opportunities. This laudable goal guided the government’s interpretation of the law for the first years of its existence. Institutions were instructed to facilitate this equal opportunity for both genders not in terms of rigid proportionality, but in accordance with the genders’ relative interests.
In 1979, the Carter Administration changed this system to directly contradict the plain language and purpose of the law, which sought to abolish all quotas. Carter’s cabinet issued an interpretation of Title IX that not only permitted the quotas the law itself prohibited, but made compliance with a quota system one of only three ways a college could prove compliance with Title IX.
In 1996 the Clinton Administration took things a step further. Not only would Title IX be interpreted to allow quotas, it would require them. Indeed, the only safe way to avoid violating Title IX was to show that the percentages of men and women athletes were equivalent to the gender ratio of the overall student population.
At many colleges this was impossible, because more men than women had an interest in athletics. Since it wasn’t feasible to force women to participate to even out the numbers, the Clinton Administration had another way. Colleges could simply eliminate perfectly good existing men’s sports teams, and arbitrarily cap men’s future participation in sports programs. With minor changes, this is the system that governs today, leading to the cuts at James Madison and other colleges.
Can you imagine the situation at James Madison happening at your local high school?
No legally binding rule or regulation ever has formally applied Carter’s 1979 interpretation to the high school setting. Were it so applied, as some advocacy groups proudly desire, the result would be the largest quota system in America’s history, governing millions of high school athletes across America.
This is not only legally improper, but also absurd public policy. High school sports share none of the concerns over scholarship money and nationwide recruiting that are so crucial to collegiate sports, and that are the focus of Title IX’s application to colleges. High school students participate in sports not based on available scholarships or recruiting efforts but purely out of interest.
Thus, the government has no business limiting the participation of interested high school athletes just to satisfy a quota as an end in itself. Given the many proven benefits of athletic participation — including the development of leadership skills and the encouragement of physical fitness –the government should not advocate policies that limit opportunity based on quotas.
It’s been 35 years since the enactment of Title IX. This milestone is a celebration of the achievements of female athletes, and rightly so.
But it also should serve as a time for the government to reconsider the way it has interpreted the law to mean whatever it wants it to mean, even when that diametrically opposes Title IX’s clear language and original purpose. America’s high school athletes deserve a new view of this old law, and not one turned on its head.
The key point of the article and the salient point is the government’s interpreting the law to mean whatever the government wants it to mean.
This is a common government practice and not limited to this case. The government will and does abuse its authority over and over.
The old Yiddish saying, “Give a dog a finger and it takes the whole hand!” is applicable to government. For them this is SOP as it’s the nature of the beast.
For us vigilance and the will to resist government abuse is necessary if we hope to remain free citizens and not subjects and serfs.
This creeping expansion is not limited to government. Management is not content just to manage a system that’s already in place. It has to make changes to feel worthy. If the management team is an existing one, it must make things work “better”. If it is a new team, it must make a difference by changing or adding to what the previous team did.
P.S.
This is just another attempt by liberals to close the inequality gap. If you can’t better mediocrity, then bring excellence down to the level of the mediocre, or eliminate it altogether.
Sedonaman is absolutely correct in his post script. This is exactly what happens when an egalitarian ideology takes over.
Another fallacy of egalitarian thought is to actively comingle the high and low elements of society in the expectation that the low element will rise to the higher thus improving society.
WRONG!!! What happens is the high falls to the level of the lowest because our base instincts are released and no longer restrained.
Well it’s egalitarian in that that society becomes equal. Unfortunately it’s equal in savagery, debasement, immorality and our darkest base instincts.
NHGrouch:
That’s right. Paraphrasing Pareto: “When outcomes are equalized, they will be equalized at a low level.”
It is why all Leftist societies are wretched.