Schlafly on Michigan Title IX Case

Here is Phyllis Schlafly's take on the Michigan Title IX case:

Feminists are now ruthlessly trying to use Title IX to force public schools to comply with the same outrageous gender quotas as are used in colleges. If feminists succeed, public high schools will have to eliminate 1 million boys from high school sports teams.

Feminists sued the Michigan High School Athletic Association over the issue of whether girls' basketball, volleyball and other sports must be scheduled in the same seasons as the boys. The schedule had called for different seasons in order to maximize the convenient use of limited sports facilities.

But feminists cried discrimination, and they won. It is amazing that judges think they have the authority and the wisdom to decide which seasons high school boys and girls will play which sports.

What Schlafly glosses over in her characterization of MHSAA's decision as one of "conven[ience in the] use of limited sports facilities" is that the boys sports got all of the convenience. It may be true that sports facilities in Michigan are operating at capacity and can't possibly support concurrent girls' and boys' seasons (even though every other state's high schools seem to manage). But year after year, female athletes of several sports got stuck playing in the "off" season, while never once did that happen to the boys. If the season in which sports are played are truly so immaterial, a rotation or a sharing arragement would have been the obvious, simple solution (certainly cheaper than litigation).

It's also disingenuous to characterize the opinion as deciding "which seasons high school boys and girls will play which sports." The court does not micromanage the scheduling of sports. What it does is insist that the scheduling of girls sports as the admitted afterthought to boys' sports was "discrimination on the basis of sex" within the meaning of Title IX.