Title IX: Revenge of the Shrews

President Richard M. Nixon, an otherwise brilliant man, suffered a lapse of naivety on June 23, 1972, when he signed into law these thirty-seven words: "No person in the United States shall on the basis of gender, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Where was President Nixon's cynicism when he needed it? Signed at the height of the feminist movement -- erstwhile known as that "era of bitterness, anger and resentment" -- did he actually believe the law-- Title IX -- would not be twisted, contorted and used by the testosterone-hating-shrews within the feminist cause to attack men in some manner?

Nixon's sense of fair play colored his judgement. Of course, girls should be afforded the same opportunities in education that boys enjoyed. Unfortunately, Title IX in its current form is a sledgehammer wielded by angry and bitter women to exact revenge for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to pass. Any effort to inject common sense into the law is met with feminazi lawyers and their threats of litigation.

In her book Women Who Make The World Worse, Kate O'Beirn exposes the real aim of Title IX-activists: "The feminists' signature brew of dishonesty, intimidation, and hypocrisy has been he familiar recipe in the campaign they claim is designed to increase the number of women who engage in sports...In the name of leveling the playing field, these women are determined to tackle the male dominance in sports, which they see as a despised vestige of male privilege and powers, and a precursor to male violence." By using Title IX to attack sports at the collegiate and high school levels, it is the goal of the feminists to castrate men (in a figurative sense, of course -- however, with this group of nags, one never knows for sure) and male dominated ventures because all of it is a prelude to some bum beating his wife.

I began coaching wrestling in 1995 at Westside High School in Memphis. Like the average American, I knew little of Title IX or its pernicious enforcement. As my wrestlers became more involved in wrestling, they would ask about wrestling in college. All "inner-city" kids, they loved the sport and were good at it. Other athletes had a chance at a scholarship. Why not them? I began to look into wrestling on the collegiate level and found little to speak of. In Tennessee, for example, there is just one Division 1 school that wrestles: the University of Tennessee- Chattanooga. No Vanderbilt. No University of Tennessee. No University of Memphis. I became very anti-Title IX the more I investigated it. I had wrestlers capable of wrestling in college, but there were no opportunities for them to do such. Courtney Guy was the TSSAA State Runner-up at 215 pounds in 1998. Going into his senior year, he would have been a highly recruited wrestler -- if it was 1972, when there were 777 colleges and universities with wrestling teams. Unfortunately, in 1999, his year of graduation, there were fewer than 100 Division 1 wrestling teams. A scholarship was his only chance at college, as was the case with all the wrestlers on my team. In a sensible world, he would have been competing in college after his high school graduation. Of course, "sensible" is not a word to be used when liberals with an agenda and a chip on their shoulders take hold of anything.

The truth of Title IX is ugly. It is nothing more than government sanctioned discrimination aimed at eliminating male sports. While football and basketball are untouchable to the shrews -- someone has to pay for the social engineering and women's crew teams -- other male sports are not. In 1972, as mentioned, there were 777 wrestling teams in the NCAA. According to Intermat, an amateur wrestling site, 447 collegiate teams have been eliminated since 1972, despite the fact that high school wrestling grows each year and is very popular. The Southeastern Conference, arguably the best athletic conference in the nation, has not one school with a wrestling team. Wrestling is not the only affected sport. Baseball, track, tennis, water polo, swimming, fencing and any other male sport is subject to be eliminated by the insane demands of Title IX compliance. UCLA's swimming team earned 22 medals at the Olympics, yet it was ended in 1993. According to the NCAA, between 1992 and 1997, 20,000 male athletes -- or "athletic opportunities" -- were eliminated. The NCAA now reports that there are more women's teams than there are men's teams; this is entirely due to Title IX. When surveyed, men typically express more interest in athletic competition than women. (Do we need surveys to know this? Look at any elementary playground.) Intramural athletics on college campuses, which are strictly voluntary, are overwhelmingly male, yet female athletes take precedent at colleges due to Title IX and its threat of non-compliance, which can result in a loss of federal money.

While feminists routinely and loudly hail Title IX now, they paid little attention to the law its first decade of existence. It was only after the expiration of the ERA in 1982 that the perpetually-aggrieved of the feminist movement turned its sights on athletics. At midnight on June 30, 1982, the ERA expired, and the "jihad" on male athletes began. Phyllis N. Segal, then legal director of the National Organization of Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund, said at the time: "What we need to do, in the absence of a national mandate and clear policy statement, is to apply and defend the progress that has been made and to develop tools to take the profit and habit out of sexual discrimination." The "tool" of choice would be Title IX. Jessica Gavora, author of Tilting the Playing Field, writes of the outlook of feminists in the early 1980s: "Many of the gains that feminists had hoped to secure with the ERA, they saw, could be achieved through expansion and manipulation of the law (Title IX) against discrimination."

Using a 1979 policy interpretation of the law, the Title IX-mafia would use just one prong of the "three prong test" to dismantle male team after male team. While there are three ways to be in compliance with Title IX, only one -- the proportionality prong -- has been used to determine if a school is in compliance: "Providing athletic opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment." Translated this means that if a school has a student body that is 60% female, then 60% of all things athletic must also be female: athletes, scholarships, teams, etc. Failure to be in compliance means costly lawsuits and the aforementioned loss of federal funds. Rather than fight the good fight, spineless bureaucrats and administrators would rather cower at the first sight of the NOW-gang lawyers.

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) oversees Title IX enforcement and compliance. During the Reagan and Bush I administrations, the office performed its job much like a cop does his: react and respond to a complaint or crime. A police officer cannot be proactive and "create" a crime on a slow night. That is profiling, harassment or entrapment. This, however, is exactly what the OCR did throughout the 1990s. It created Title IX "problems" where none existed. Consequently, the 1990s is the decade that saw the most males' teams eliminated.

The election of Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992 brought with it many 1960s radicals and their agendas. No one was more radical than Ms. Norma Cantu, longtime member of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Dubbed one of Clinton's "quota queens," Ms. Cantu would live up to the moniker as the head "capo" in the OCR. Under her stewardship, Title IX became an official quota, as Representative Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, in a rare moment of honesty and candor, once noted: "It is the biggest quota you've ever seen. It is 50-50. It's a quota -- a big, round quota."

Unlike the cop on the beat, Ms. Cantu's OCR would not just react to Title IX complaints or problems; her OCR would create them. Unduly influenced by the Women's Sports Foundation, a radical organization formed by lesbian-activist Billie Jean King, Norma Cantu's OCR, it its first nineteen months alone, attacked 240 schools. launching investigative "reviews" into their Title IX practices. Not a single school targeted had ever been the subject of even one complaint. Furthermore, Ms.Cantu ordered the OCR's ten regional offices to "double" the number of its complaints. In other words, it became official policy to harass and intimidate universities and to create problems where none existed.

Norma Cantu's tenure at the OCR was one of spite. Football was never to be discussed as the sport relates to Title IX enforcement. Carrying 100 scholarships/slots per year, if football were removed from the equation, it would allow many schools to be in compliance with the asinine quotas set by Title IX. Cantu and her tribe would never agree with excluding football from the equation, even though there is no female-equivalent sport. It is as if Cantu and the rest of the angry spinsters don't want schools to comply. Full compliance would negate their jobs. Walk-on players, who don't get scholarships and play for love of the game, are included in the numbers game. Consequently, walk-on slots have been radically reduced due to the numbers demands of Title IX. Potential walk-ons have to be "invited" to walk-on by coaches. So committed to proportionality is the OCR that even private citizens, alumni, and boosters cannot fund a team that has been eliminated. The University of Southern California and Princeton ran afoul of the bean-counters in the mid-1990s and chose to shut down their swimming and wrestling teams. Private money and boosters stepped forward to fund each team, but the universities shut them down anyway. Said Carol Zaleski of United States Swimming, "It's not a question of money. It's a question of numbers."

Many in the anti-quota crowd took a sigh of relief with the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Finally, some thought, common sense will find its way into Title IX. Such wasn't meant to be.

In 2002, Rod Paige, Bush's Secretary of Education, announced the formation of the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics (COA), a panel of former sports figures and policy wonks who would look into Title IX and its enforcement. The commission hoped to find ways to improve the law. Four townhall-style meetings were held across the nation to allow the public to express their views and offer suggestions for improving the law. The reaction from the usual suspects was immediate and hysterical. Feminists were apoplectic at the mere mention of altering Title IX. "We are deeply troubled by the commission's action," said Jocelyn Samuels, the vice-president of the National Women's Law Center, adding, "This allows the secretary of education to radically restructure current practices..." The irony of Ms. Samuel's words flies right over her head; "radically restructure" Title IX is exactly what Norma Cantu did from her first day on the job. Donna Lopiano, the executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, chimed in also: "The commission has opened the barn door for the Bush administration to weaken Title IX. This gives the education secretary license to do pretty much anything he wants." And Norma Cantu didn't do whatever she felt?

Ultimately, the COA and the townhall meetings were a sham. The Title IX-mafia won in the end. Though all the recommendations of the COA, including eliminating quotas, were approved by an 8-5 vote of the commission's members, Secretary Paige said he would only act on those measures that were unanimous, thus giving a veto to the very people who caused the problems with Title IX and the reason for the commission in the first place. In a future Republican administration -- such would never happen in a Democratic one -- Title IX might be revisited. One can only hope.

Title IX is what happens whenever an angry member of the permanently indignant with an axe to grind gets to exorcise the permanent chip on their shoulder. Common sense is tossed aside in favor of an agenda. More often than not that agenda is about "getting someone" or "atoning" for past sins. It might be the wealthy one moment, or corporations the next, but someone is going to pay when it comes to radicals and their agendas. Men are the "despised sex" for feminists, so male athletes paid the price. Such is the price for "social justice," a term that should make any sane person cringe when hearing it because at some point "they" could be the target for the do-gooders.