Bush’s Department of Education "clarification" of Title IX has set women’s sports back 30 years (see story in LA Times here)
To make it easier for colleges to screw women over, new federal guidelines make women’s civil rights an "opt-in" issue.
That’s right. Rather than requiring equal opportunity across the board, Title IX compliance can now be established if schools merely send students an email survey assessing women’s "interest" in sports. Non-responses will count as non-interest. Thus, women’s opportunities in school sports are equal to men’s only so long as enough girls remember to send in their survey. Lovely.
As far as I can determine, men are not required to return email surveys that affect their civil rights.
This is great! They should apply this method to everything. I know! Let’s make black people send in emails expressing their interest in not being slaves!
As soon as enough girls forget to renew their civil rights by email, state schools can ditch those pesky women’s sports programs and get back to concentrating on what they do best: churning out America’s supply of thickneck date-rapist jocks and the sexy cheerleaders who do them.
Bah. One of my nieces, now a college sophomore, played high school volleyball & basketball for a spell. Even with Title IX, they seemed to have fewer resources than the boys’ teams. I hate to imagine what effect this latest bureaucratic atrocity will have on budgets for girls’ sports.
I’m sure this new red-tape-hoop-to-be-jumped-through will achieve the desired effect of screwing a few small school districts (who don’t have full-time attorneys or compliance officers overseeing their athletic programs) out of federal funding, or something equally distasteful.
In addition to the obvious sexism, which you have succintly addressed in your post, this is another fine example of an Administration that talks “smaller government” but ends up creating more useless paperwork, while also spending like the proverbial drunken sailors on everything *but* education.
To paraphrase the old bumper sticker, what if schools got all the money they needed, and the Defense Dept. had to hold car washes & bake sales to fund their crazy, non-functional missile defense system?
I repeat: Bah.