Thursday, February 21, 2008

God help me...

...for bringing up this issue again but the controversy engendered by the "rules" at St. Mary's Academy in Kansas (sorry for the initial mistake placing this event in Missouri--the taglines all cited Missouri) just keeps growing. My students brought it up in class last night and they thought it was pretty ridiculous (even the one who was raised and went to a conservative Catholic high school herself) that St. Mary's would not let a woman referee a boys' game.
But the news of the discrimination--the illegal kind, not the discrimination that is a matter of taste or preference--has gone overseas. This article is actually helpful in providing more information about what happened in 2004 when St. Mary's refused to play a high school team whose roster included a young woman.
It also shares that the game in which Michelle Campbell was not allowed to ref due only to her gender was completed with a school administrator serving as the ref. Not sure what the Kansas State High School Activities Association is going to do with that. The school administrator would have to be (and perhaps he is) sanctioned by the association in order for the game to count one would think.
Campbell's fellows referees refused to work the game with many of them vowing not to work any St. Mary's games in the future, which was a good decision. Yet no one on the Wichita team seemed to have a problem with going forward.

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