This might be the stupidest thing you read all day.
A Catholic high school baseball team, Our Lady of Sorrows in Phoenix, Ariz. has forfeited the Arizona championship game so as to avoid playing against a girl.
Paige Sultzbach is the second baseman for Mesa Prepatory Academy, which does not offer a girls softball team. Our Lady Sorrows has a policy against co-ed sports and said in a statement that the school teaches boys respect by not placing them in athletic competition against girls where "proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty."
So take a moment to think about that one.
According to a report in the Associated Press, Sultzbach previously sat out two games against Sorrows earlier in the season out of respect for their religious beliefs (gracious of her, but unnecessary), but asking her to sit out the championship was too much. So Sorrows loses.
"Does she have cooties?" asks Lisa Maatz, director of public policy at the American Association of University Women.
"In real life, these boys are going to be competing against the girls for jobs, for positions in graduate programs or in trade schools," said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, senior director of advocacy for the Women's Sports Foundation. "In every other area of their life, they are going to be competing side by side."
To be fair to the Catholics out there, the school is a part of Society of Saint Pius X, a conservative sect that broke from the Vatican in the 1980s and is not officially recognized as a part of the Catholic Church.
I'll leave a discussion of the specific gender issues in the Church to my more learned Catholic and non-Catholic readers, but I'd like to say something about women in baseball.
Women should be playing baseball. Softball is not an adequate substitute.
Fast pitch Softball is an inferior game, and not because it is a game played by women. The competition of fast pitch softball is not as fair as in baseball, as we see in the extreme dominance of the good softball pitchers. Softball has artificial rules (runners are not allowed to lead off) to cover over essential incongruities that are organically self-policed in baseball.
But I'm not trying to denigrate softball - people who enjoy and appreciate it should play it. But restricting women's opportunities to play baseball by funneling all of them into softball is, to me, a violation of women's civil rights.
Baseball is one of the best things America has ever invented, and you're going to tell me that, in 2012, we are denying half our citizens the opportunity to play it? Imagine if women were denied access to jazz music because they could be doing show tunes instead, or restricted from serving in federal government because they're offered municipal government instead.
Further, I believe women would actually be really good at baseball if we gave them the shot.
The most important thing to having a functional baseball game, particularly at youth and introductory levels, is having a pitcher who can throw strikes. And although women pitchers wouldn't have the arm strength that males have, there would be far more women ball players who have the balance and flexibilty needed for the consistent, repeatable pitching delivery that yields a lot of strikes.
I hate it that women cannot play baseball. The opportunity to play baseball, and the joy that comes with it, is a fundamental civil right of every American, I believe. If I ever have a daughter (god help her), and she decides she might rather try baseball instead of softball or some other activity, I'll fight whoever I'd need to fight to get her on a ball diamond.
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[AP]
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